
Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business? - ceohockey60
https://interconnected.blog/why-is-facebook-not-in-the-cloud-business/
======
nikhilsimha
Used to work at fb in an infra team.

Their abstraction for job scheduling (Tupperware) is about 5 years behind -
something like Borg or EC2/EMR. Something like that is a fundamental reason
why fb can’t do cloud as it is right now.

Plus, the infra teams do operate like product - impact at all costs. Which to
most management translates to short-term impact over technical quality.

It would be a true 180 in terms of eng culture if they could pull off a cloud
platform. An example is how they bought Parse and killed it, while firebase at
google is doing extremely well.

Having said all that, I think focusing on impact over technical quality is
probably the right business decision for what they were trying to do at the
time - drive engagement and revenue.

~~~
pier25
> firebase at google is doing extremely well

Source?

It's certainly popular but everyone I know (me included) is running away from
it asap.

~~~
matt2000
Why are you running away from it? I have occasionally toyed with using it in a
couple situations, just wondering what the dealbreakers are.

~~~
JustAPerson
Not the person you responded to, but I just joined somewhere new and it's
clear Firebase was the biggest mistake / is the biggest source of technical
debt. It was helpful for bootstrapping 6 years ago, but now it stands out as
the worst part of our tech stack. For our small shop, we will not be able to
migrate any time soon.

\- Most frustrating are the outages we have no control over. It seems like
every other day, the server running our firebase instance mysteriously
disappears from the internet. We can ping `my-app.fibaseio.com` but receive no
events from it. This lasts anywhere from 5 to 25 minutes. Usually there is no
blip in the firebase status page. The main devs have given up trying to debug
it.

\- We are nearing the resource limits of the paid plan for a single realtime
database. We're working on splitting our one database into a master and
sharding what we can.

\- The particular eventual consistency and transaction semantics require
workarounds everywhere. If you want an atomic transaction, you have to perform
it on some common parent, but you are also encouraged to keep your data model
flat and normalize as much as possible. Our integration test suite is tiny and
horrendously slow because we cannot rely on Firebase to be timely, so there
are huge timeouts everywhere that regularly take ages. Every past attempt at
tuning the timeouts to be shorter eventually causes spurious failures a week
later.

\- Unless your data closely models the kind of chat application Firebase was
built around, you end up needing a real database eventually. Not just to
perform real queries with joins and complex logic, but also to essentially
maintain indices that anemic mobile clients can use because the firebase
filtered query semantics are limited to a single key. Now you need some kind
of daemon to shuffle data in and out of your real database. Unfortunately,
your real database is missing tons of foreign key constraints because that's
the easiest way to handle firebase's eventual consistency.

That's just my take a month after joining somewhere intimately coupled to
firebase.

~~~
mrlambchop
>The main devs have given up trying to debug it.

Well, now you have my interest! Is this a talent gap or fatigue in the
organization? Sounds like a meaty challenge.

~~~
JustAPerson
It's a combination of a lack of developer bandwidth, fatigue, and typical
difficult google customer service. Previously it was just a sole backend
developer who also did the server operations/SRE type stuff plus a couple
front end web developers. To them, it quickly became just a fact of life after
repeatedly failing to find a solution. The customer service people don't like
that, because these short down times always happen during standard business
hours (only time our service is ever used). Complaints about disrupted sales
pitches or customer demos go ignored.

I'm joining as the second backend developer, so maybe while I'm still green
and have the naive bravery, I will go give it another shot next time it
happens. I don't know much about advanced networking, but we suspect there's
some kind of partition happening frequently between our servers and our
production firebase instance. Uncertain how to debug that and how to work
around it. It usually affects all of our servers, which are located in a
single data center. I suppose next time I will try to track down and inspect
the socket being used by the firebase SDK, but I don't really know what to be
looking for at that point.

~~~
elialbert
just gonna throw out there - in the time it'll take you to do that socket
level debugging, you could probably port the whole app back to sql.

------
jedberg
They may still get into the business, and it would make sense for them to do
so, and may even solve their privacy problem while they are at it.

Amazon did it a long time ago, and when they started, they had no sales team.
They had to build that capability slowly over time, but they had the first
mover advantage, so they had time to learn. Now they are number one.

Microsoft already had the enterprise sales team, they had to learn how to sell
cloud. They had some trouble with the shift, and with the technology, but now
they are knocking it out of the park, and are solidly in the number two spot
behind Amazon.

Google is struggling with their cloud business. While what they offer is
technically superior to all their competitors, they don’t have the sales team,
nor the experience in building one. They are trying, but they haven’t gotten
the hang of it yet, and in the meantime, Amazon and Microsoft just keep
growing.

This is the position Facebook would be in. They probably have the technology,
or can at least attract the necessary talent to build it (I know that I would
at least listen if they said, “Come build a new cloud with us from the ground
up”). But they don’t have the enterprise sales team, just like Google.

Now, in Google’s defense, they have realized they are coming from behind, and
as such have focused on selling their higher level services. If you want to do
AI and Machine Learning, Google’s cloud is the place to do it! And then maybe
while you’re there, if your core business is AI, maybe you’ll use some of
their other services as well, since your data is already there.

Facebook could make a similar play. They could build a cloud and then require
any 3rd party apps that work with Facebook to use their cloud. This would
jumpstart their adoption, and could potentially help them solve their privacy
issues. They could require that you never send any personal Facebook data out
of their cloud, and could closely monitor all the outbound traffic. Then they
could theoretically allow _even more access_ to Facebook data, if they knew
they could control what happens to that data after the 3rd party gets hold of
it.

In other words they could launch a cloud that lets you run your 3rd party
Facebook apps in a controlled and audited way, and even give you building
blocks to do it quickly and efficiently. It would boost their bottom line,
because there is good margins in compute and storage, and at the same time
give them more control of their own data.

~~~
tonystubblebine
Google has a real trust issue with me that's twofold.

One is that you can't trust them to stick with a product offering. They are
driven by a throw things at the wall and see what sticks strategy rather than
some deeper vision for the world. So I'm always suspicious that they will
abandon anything they launch.

Two is that they don't believe in offering quality support. I had this issue
with an Android app recently. It got flagged incorrectly for a compliance
concern and I was not able to reach a knowledgable human under any
circumstances, including getting it escalated by internal Google staff. I
would have easily paid a support contract, $1k or more, to get access to a
human. In the end, I had to guess at what their algorithm was flagging and
just ended up tricking it through trial and error.

~~~
ghayes
Neither of these concerns affect Google Cloud Platform. 1) Google has not
cancelled any GCP product that I know of, and 2) GCP has excellent support
with fast SLA-timed responses from support personnel. Additionally, Google,
the org., recently decided to redouble efforts to grow GCP.

~~~
jedberg
It doesn't matter though. Until they fix their product trust issues for the
rest of their business, people will always conflate them.

~~~
rossjudson
I understand what you're saying, but it can be frustrating at times.

"I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".

~~~
wolfgke
> "I got a counterfeit product on Amazon, therefore I won't trust AWS".

This is actually a good argument. I can easily imagine that this could become
a problem for Amazon in the future.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
It's not just "I bought a counterfeit item on Amazon".. But instead:

"Amazon continues to allow counterfeits to pervade. I cannot trust them with
anything important."

------
pavlov
They were. Doesn't anyone remember Parse?

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-
parse](https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse)

~~~
s_m
I am kind of amazed the author didn't mention Parse once.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
I was exposed to Parse, but was it ever widely used/popular?

~~~
gfosco
It's still actively developed. [https://github.com/parse-community/parse-
server](https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server)

------
efsavage
I worked at FB, and I think they would probably do OK if they entered the
space as they are very smart about physical infrastructure, but the most
plausible explanation I heard from an executive (forget which one) when asked
this was that they are already building out at a very fast clip, and feel that
they can make a better ROI by using that infrastructure themselves rather than
renting it out.

~~~
mgiampapa
Zuck has said as much at all hands meetings.

If the growth knobs were turned off across all it's products and spare
capacity became a thing, then it might make sense, but at the rate they are
building there is no purpose to being a middle man.

Make a code optimization and save 1-2% of CPU on the web tier and you will be
a hero.

------
not2b
You make money if you are the #1 or #2 player in a market. If you are more
like #4, you will just lose money. If Facebook tried to enter the cloud market
today, they would be way behind. Without a unique advantage that would induce
customers to switch, why would anyone switch? And if they tried to compete by
cutting prices they would just lose money.

~~~
caymanjim
I agree with your statement, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
AWS is dominant, but their software/tools are horrendous. Their web admin UI
looks, feels, and has the general usability of some horrible Java enterprise
tool designed by a committee of Windows developers in the mid-00s, because
that's exactly what it is. I don't know how Azure and GCloud compare, but they
cannot possibly be worse. AWS does what people need, but I don't know anyone
who likes working with it. Except maybe Windows admins from the 00s.

~~~
AsyncAwait
Agreed, I feel like AWS has the worst UI of them all, followed by Azure's
Metro/Visual Studio-style UI and then GCP is OK on the UI front, but lacks
when it comes to monitoring and configuration options for things like CloudSQL
for example.

~~~
aeyes
AWS is all about the API, some services don't even have a UI. Once you start
using the API AWS is the best option out there.

~~~
caymanjim
Yeah. My AWS experience is on small-scale deployments--up to a few dozen
servers. It's painful to manage them through the Amazon UI. When I left that
client, the devops team there was transitioning to TerraForm and other
deployment and configuration systems, and connecting to in-house monitoring
systems. That's the right approach. It's out of reach for smaller teams who
can't afford the extra engineering; they're better off with something like
Digital Ocean. DO has a fantastic UI and a decent API, but doesn't support
anywhere near the level of enterprise features that AWS does.

------
seshagiric
I heard they are very passionate in aligning to their mission - empowering
people to form community and brining world together.

How does entering into Cloud Business align to the company mission? Wouldn't
it be a distraction?

~~~
viklove
I think you misspelled "spying on users and selling data/ads."

~~~
nojvek
Well both Google and FB have some sort of vague bullshit mission statements.
What matters at the end of day is growth and how wallstreet sees them. That's
how they measure themselves. Facebook more-so than it's peers "Growth at any
cost".

------
stopachka
(Former FB Eng)

The main reason is because it doesn't align with FB's values.

How is building a cloud business going to connect the world?

(As fluffy as this sounds, mission was taken seriously -- all the way up to
Schrep)

~~~
bor100003
How do the Libra crypto connect the world? No sarcasm here.

~~~
lmm
Having an easy way to send money around the world without having to worry
about which currency it should be in would be a huge help for some
communities. A lot of artistic/creative groups work on a kind of semi-gift-
economy model where everyone buys everyone else's stuff, not quite as an arms-
length market-value transaction but as a semi-social interaction where you buy
things from the people you hang out with online at what's probably more than a
"fair" price. Having something like Patreon but less US-specific and more
closely integrated with social media (admittedly Patreon's integration with
Discord is starting to fill that gap) would genuinely help.

------
tekkk
Without first-mover advantage, without the enterprise sales network it would
be just foolish for FB to waste their time and energy on such highly
competitive field without much of natural advantages. You don't really
synergize social media with cloud infra.

And they know it too, so they rather compete in fields where they are good at,
namely social media and apps. Maybe its part laziness, part lack of interest
on their part too. But to me it would be wiser to focus on some promising new
areas, rather than start catching up 2 laps behind the competition. Yet it's
not easy, like VR/AR market shows. Maybe in ML services they could challenge
Google a little more.

~~~
throwaway894345
> You don't really synergize social media with cloud infra.

I think your first-mover and competitive industry points stand, but I don't
see how retail and search synergize better with cloud infra than social. The
cloud infra business model is (as far as I can tell) just building general
purpose computing-at-scale features in a reusable, billable way and selling
those to consumers. VM/container/database/serverless/etc orchestration isn't
more aligned with retail than other businesses as far as I can tell.

~~~
tekkk
Well with retail you are kind of already in the business of buying and selling
hardware, so to me it doesn't seem that big of a stretch. In both you are
handling big volumes with very high emphasis on cost-margins.

Search, yeah. Intrinsically maybe not, but Google has some very skilled
engineers and researchers, who have pioneered a lot of the modern cloud
applications/algorithms eg Borg/k8s, MapReduce, GFS and so on. So they have
the know-how on how to build topnotch services, just not maybe as good
business-savviness to sell them.

------
KaiserPro
Here are a few reasons:

1) its hard to do well and still be profitable.

2) It would require a massive internal shift, The security tools internally
for doing things like IAMs are far to primitive. It would take years to re-
tool, stopping momentum on products that make money

3) its not where Zuckerberg see facebook in the future. That future is AR/VR.

Google stumbled with AR, It's structure means that any AR will eat at the
mobile buisness.

Apple might make a splash, but its unlikely that they will be first to market.

Which leaves a whole segment for facebook to dominate, if it makes a decent
product, and tackles it's image.

~~~
nojvek
Apple just unveiled an ipad with lidar sensors. I would say Apple is poised to
make the biggest impact since they can make the most phenomenal mass market
hardware and well designed software to go with it.

AR/VR will still take a while to be mass market. We need a lot more compute,
better algorithms and hardware.

------
scarface74
_All of these clouds are spawned out of already-large tech companies, many of
whom have built a massive technical infrastructure to support their original
businesses, then turn those resources into services to rent out in the form of
cloud_

This is a myth that’s been disputed several times by high ranking Amazon
officials. Amazon never turned their internal infrastructure into AWS. It was
always a completely separate initiative. Amazon was not on AWS for years.

Google also only uses GCP for a few internal services.

~~~
jvolkman
Many of GCP's services did actually grow out of Google's internal tools. For
example, BigQuery is a public version of Google's internal Dremel. And Cloud
Spanner is of course a public version of Spanner.

~~~
kube-system
And Kubernetes came from Borg.

~~~
ovi256
Kubernetes is an open-source project inspired by Borg, not a proprietary
product like the examples given by GP.

~~~
pradn
Yes, Kubernetes's design was inspired by Borg, but the code is not Borg's
code. BigQuery and Cloud Spanner use most of the code of the internal
versions. That's the difference.

------
AznHisoka
I think it's a mix of:

1) being too late in the game, at this stage.

2) unable to rebrand themselves as a trustworthy service for enterprises.
They're stuck with the "social" and "fun" label.

------
niftich
While they have competent infrastructure, an IaaS offering needs a platform
whose capabilities are more complex than one where you're running only first-
party applications. And even if they spent the time and effort, they'd be
entering a commoditified, crowded field. All the big players can run servers,
the value-add is from SaaS and/or surrounding PaaS, the latter of which they'd
have to build from scratch.

Their previous forays into PaaS, done at a time when Twitter was also in this
space, have faltered. And Facebook's pre-existing services are too far up the
stack to be relevant to any IaaS ambition.

I doubt the 'trust issues' contribute significantly in Facebook's decision to
not offer this, but I agree they'd be a factor for potential customers once
the offering came to be. Facebook's branding is odd in that they've doubled
down on the Facebook brand despite acquiring services that flourished in part
for being "not Facebook". They seem resistant to rebrand into a holding
company, and their choice supports the view that the company's tech mission is
to remain tightly coupled with their flagship social network.

------
enos_feedler
The big miss for Facebook isn’t cloud computing platforms, but mobile
platforms. Mark has admitted this himself when asked what his mistakes/regrets
are. It was easy to miss in the context of social’s massive growth. But the
dust is settling and it is clear that mobile platforms hold tremendous power
over consumere.

~~~
scarface74
Facebook didn’t _miss_ mobile. They completely repositioned themselves when it
came to mobile and pivoted away from being an app platform.

Mobile was the best thing that happen to them.

~~~
enos_feedler
I think you give Facebook too much credit for repositioning themselves.
Facebook and the news feed was a natural product for mobile. There was no
pivot at all. They merely saw where user attention was going and built for
that surface. I would argue they got off track by building for mobile "web"
and thinking native APIs weren't important. Then they course corrected. But I
think the miss here is that social connectivity was a new thing happening to
software and they could have made a strong play to influence the direction of
the mobile OS. They don't have much leverage now.

~~~
ahupp
Facebook did a huge company-wide refocus on mobile at a time when it was not
at all clear smartphones were going to become the dominant platform. I really
do give zuck et.al. a lot of credit for seeing that coming [source: I was an
employee at the time]

------
umeshunni
They are. They sell FB Workplace:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_by_Facebook)
[https://www.workplace.com/](https://www.workplace.com/)

~~~
wmf
I think the article is talking about lower-level IaaS/PaaS.

------
daxfohl
Based on what would they expect to win business, from whom? Could they do it
at lower cost? Probably not. Do they have any technology that leapfrogs the
others? Not aware of any. Do they have good business relationships for this
sort of thing? No. So what else is there?

------
tanilama
I don't think the author understands why/how Cloud business works.

Software is just part of it. It is a logistics problem fundamentally. And
Amazon is not only a software shop, it is also the most advanced logistics
company in US, both physically and virtually, and those two go hand-in-hand.

So no, I don't think FB can get into Cloud business anytime soon, and I also
doubt they have that much of the cash to actually expand the business, it is
going to be huge investment, globally. The market right now is not going to be
forgiving to new comers.

Disclaimer: ex-AWS employee

------
barryrandall
Short answer: they’re not at all trustworthy.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Then why is Google? They have the same business model and disregard for
privacy.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Google has never been implicated in a plot to hack the U.S. presidential
election. Now, I don't actually _Believe_ that the ads displayed on facebook
had any real impact on how people voted. They were never on screen for very
long, and they took up a small percentage of screen space compared to all the
other user and advertiser generated content. But Zuckerberg did testify before
congress on live TV and that's what people are going to remember.

~~~
madhadron
Google and Twitter were targeted by the Russians as well. They just didn't go
public when they found the evidence, unlike Facebook, until after Facebook
did. Facebook bears the brunt in the press because it screwed over the press
so much in recent years.

------
m_ke
I’d like to know why they’re not in the search business. They have enough
signal from their platforms to offer great personalized search results and it
would allow them to grow their ad revenue with intent based ads.

~~~
enos_feedler
The same reason why Apple is not in the search business even though search is
a key part of the phone experience: someone else does the job really well.

Facebook would need a way to differentiate the search experience. I don't
think personalization is enough since Google personalizes too.

I also don't think a company should build products for the _purpose_ of
revenue. Revenue is the output of building a great product with a purpose for
users. So I think it goes back to Facebook asking what unique purpose would it
provide in it's search experience?

~~~
m_ke
Facebook should get into the search business for the same reason that Apple is
getting into the software subscription business, it's an obvious way to grow
their business.

Facebook already has the analytics in place from their share buttons, ad
platform and user engagement on the feed to create a great ranking system. A
lot of people already use instagram to search for restaurants, fashion, travel
and products, same goes for facebook marketplace and business pages, all
they'd need to do is expand the search bars in their apps to include web
results. Tracking search queries would give them true intent data that they
could use to improve their ad targeting across their whole ad platform.

The only thing google has on facebook right now is the ability to let
advertisers target search queries. (just did a google search and it looks like
they're starting to add that option:
[https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-
are-...](https://www.facebook.com/business/news/reach-people-who-are-actively-
shopping-with-ads-in-facebook-search-results))

------
beardedman
I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually did enter. I don't use FB
personally, but I'm a big fan of the OSS efforts.

> biggest hurdle is trust, given its problematic record on data privacy

It is? FB is a corporation - much like Apple, Microsoft, Google & Amazon. Each
of those have had their fair share of issues throughout the years.

Too easy to be polarised with stuff like this. FB produced good tech and
supports it too - which is more than I can say for Google. But I'll use Google
for their search & docs products, which is top notch. There are no
heroes/villains.

~~~
fenwick67
Google and Facebook have particularly not-great privacy reputations because
they are advertising companies whose business models are precluded on
collecting your personal info.

~~~
alharith
You don't have to have your business model be advertising in order to be
shitty at privacy.

~~~
fenwick67
(...but it probably helps)

~~~
alharith
Counterintuitively, you are more likely to be better at privacy if you are in
the business of selling data, especially in the current regulatory climate.

The websites that have been the worst at maintaining my privacy were those
that primarily sold physical products or medical services. You'd be amazed how
many organizations broker data now.

------
nojvek
Cloud is a high volume, low margin business.

Ads are a high margin business. When looking at FB vs AppMicroAmaGoog
financials, Facebook has the highest % profit. They also make the most per
employee. Plus they are the king of social networks with Insta & Whatsapp as
their brands.

What works against them is Facebook doesn't have a great reputation with
developers, so even if they step into cloud, it will be very hard. Plus
corporations will always be worried that Facebook will peek into their usage
and power their ads engine.

------
herostratus101
> The tougher part is perhaps not technical, but human. Facebook will have to
> build out an enterprise sales and support team that is culturally and
> operationally very different from running an ad-supported social network.
> Google, also a primarily ad-supported company, suffered from this “identity
> crisis” and is still trying to catch up to AWS and Azure, despite offering
> what many believe is a superior technical product.

Who on earth believes that GCP is in the same universe as even Azure, let
alone AWS?

------
daxfohl
Given google is already starting down the ultimatum path, seems like there's
not space in this game outside of the big two. Probably a good business move
not to get involved.

~~~
nojvek
I don't think the positions are set though. We'll always want more compute,
storage and smarter platform that is reliable and affordable.

As long as Google keeps on positioning itself as reliable and does a few
things really well, they'll win those segments. They're already doing that
with K8S but their recent emails about per hour pricing was just stupid. It
sends a message that their VPs just don't understand what people really want.

------
boynamedsue
The fundamental question is this:

Would Facebook have any credibility with enterprises?

My sense: No.

------
RivieraKid
It's now a competitive, commoditized market. They would probably make more
money by buying S&P 500. (How is this not obvious to the author?)

------
hyperpower
Related: I explored Facebook's physical network in
[https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-
network/](https://nullset.xyz/2020/02/28/exploring-facebooks-network/).

------
HenriTEL
First section is misleading, cassandra, react, pytoch are not cloud tech. The
cloud is what you may need to run and scale those technologies.

What cluster management software did facebook open-sourced ? I don't see any.
Maybe they use existing open-sourced techs.

------
m0zg
Because that's not what they do, and they're too late to the game. From ex-
Google friends who work there, FB's own core infra lags Google's by more than
a decade in many cases.

------
justinholmes
I don't understand why Facebook doesn't offer there developer machine
provisioning to the outside world. They have the talent to build VPCs on top
of SDN.

------
tinyhouse
Why every large company needs to be in every business?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Every large company has certain dependencies (compute, networking, and storage
in this case, although you could argue for ex. food service, HR, maybe
financial tooling), and those dependencies entail cost and risk, with more
risk from using external vendors. So eventually, big enough companies build
their own. They build their own datacenters, write their own provisioning
tools, design their own network setups, flesh out their own HR departments.
And then they look at it and say, "hey, if we can safely sell this, we can
recoup the costs of building it, and maybe turn a profit." And if their system
is general enough, and they can deal with security well enough, then usually
they do just that. Compute is easy to rent out. Networks require some work for
security but it's quite doable. HR tends to be too specialized and/or
sensitive to resell. (But not always, and sometimes you _do_ see companies
reselling employee portals and whatnot.)

------
ravenstine
With their history with their APIs and developer support, who in their right
mind would trust Facebook for their cloud storage/computing?

~~~
greentrust
Facebook is the creator and maintainer of the most popular web framework in
the world (React). This certainly doesn't mean they should do cloud computing,
but let's not downplay their favor amongst developers.

~~~
save_ferris
Ubiquity of a library/framework doesn't translate to trust or favor among
developers. Just look at Oracle.

~~~
chrisco255
Oracle has a very significant cloud business:

$26.7B in 2019

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/or...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/06/21/oracles-
cloud-business-momentum-makes-us-revise-our-fair-value-estimate-
upward/#1ce2f0b06400)

~~~
kube-system
Yes, they do, but not because developers like them. They are infamous for
their super strong targeting of C-level for sales.

~~~
chrisco255
The correct statement is _some_ developers don't like Oracle. As for their
business tactics, every business has to find viability in its own way.
Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to
consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year. This
doesn't really answer the question why Facebook is not in the cloud business.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> Obviously Oracle is providing services of value if they are able to
> consistently turn a profit on revenue in the tens of billions per year

Not obvious; Oracle is known for underhanded marketing and lock-in. Or if you
prefer: Successfully selling to the C-levels doesn't mean that you provide
actual value.

~~~
chrisco255
Right, because C-level types are just spending $30B a year on Oracle services
for zero value added. You shouldn't take your own opinions on a provider's
services too seriously. No doubt there are some practices that are subpar but
like any competitor in a crowded marketplace, there are going to be trade-offs
between cloud providers. If the trade-offs between price, features, and value
align with the needs of an organization, they will choose Oracle. That C-suite
and devs have different needs shouldn't surprise you. There's always going to
be some tension between those two groups, because their perspective on the
business is filtered from a different set of parameters. That tension, by the
way, will necessarily create a demand for different services and functions in
the marketplace. You may not personally like Oracle, but don't pretend that
some people don't, and don't imagine for one moment that it's purely out of
ignorance.

------
surferbayarea
Their history and relationship with the developer community has been
contentious - facebook apps, parse, WhatsApp bot, etc etc

------
amelius
Commoditize your complement.

------
diyseguy
I have a similar question - why is Amazon not in the ad business?

~~~
jmknoll
They very much are. Amazon's advertising business made $14 billion last year

[https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-
grew-b...](https://marketingland.com/amazons-booming-ad-business-grew-
by-40-in-2019-275312)

~~~
tasssko
The question should be what business isn’t Amazon in!

------
blueboo
It is. It has exactly one enormously consequential customer.

------
hudvin
Yes, why not to sell data from dbs, backups, drives? :D

------
holler
I’ve honestly asked this question multiple times to people. FB made a mistake
not doing this 10+ years ago. Feels too late now. What can they offer that
isn’t available already?

------
dreamer77
I am more interested into why Netflix isn't in the cloud business. They have
developed so much for infrastructure robustness with Chaos Monkey and the
like.

~~~
hintymad
Because Netflix is razor-sharp focused on their core business?

Speaking of their infra, Netflix focuses on productivity, based on a
fundamental value that everyone inside the company has freedom and
responsibility. This culture empowers the engineers there to build amazing
tools that make employees very happy, but in the meantime the stacks they
built may not be suitable for serving individual enterprise customers. For
instance, they certainly don't fully use the elaborate security infrastructure
that AWS offers. They don't worry too much about being frugal, either.
Remember the famous saying that "Netflix is a log company that happens to
stream movies"? They do store everything, at the cost of millions of dollars.
Their monitoring system is so easy to use and so expressive, that it blows out
any known monitoring systems out of water, but in the meantime it requires
thousands of machines (amazingly, it used to be only 4 engineers manning the
whole stack. A perfect example that shows how much productivity good systems
can bring to engineers).

So, yeah, great company and great stacks, but it does not mean they can
compete in enterprise cloud business.

------
beardedman
They should be more.

------
somurzakov
because selling ads is higher margin business and more profitable. they used
to sell data (cambridge analytica etc) and that was also very profitable, not
sure how it is now

~~~
dewey
I was under the impression they ran a variety of Facebook personality quizzes
and aquired the data through that against the Facebook TOS. Do you have a
source for them "buying them" from Facebook?

~~~
Nextgrid
This is "fake news" (I hate this term but it seems very relevant in this
case).

As far as I understand Cambridge Analytica used the publicly-available
Facebook APIs to create a stupid web app (a personality test or similar) which
asked users to log in and hand over a lot of data (both about them and about
their friends).

While their end-goal was against Facebook's ToS, I don't think there's
anything they could've done about it ahead of time as 1) removing those APIs
would hurt legitimate usage (let's say for example I am building an
alternative client or similar - I _want_ to be able to see my friends' data on
there) and 2) it is still the user that is willingly giving out their and
their friends' data when logging into such an app (and Facebook makes it clear
what data the third-party service will be able to access when you first log
in).

In short it's idiots logging in and delegating their permission level (which
allows them to see their friends' data) to a malicious third-party. Facebook
isn't really to blame there. It's no different from someone telling me a
secret and then I go around and tell it to everyone else.

------
mesozoic
Not exactly on the cutting edge of tech from what I hear.

------
ycmimi
I liked Parse.

------
ksec
>The global public cloud computing spending was $229 billion in 2019 and will
grow to $500 billion in 2023, according to IDC.

So I decided to check on the article itself [1].

>"Adoption of public (shared) cloud services continues to grow rapidly as
enterprises, especially in professional services, telecommunications, and
retail......

Basically what IDC labels as cloud isn't what is being discussed in the blog,
or in the HN comment section which is pretty much strictly IaaS business. The
cloud from IDC includes SaaS. Things like ERP and CRM.

And they even said this

>Software as a Service (SaaS) will be the largest category of cloud computing,
capturing more than half of all public cloud spending in throughout the
forecast. SaaS spending,

Which basically makes the blog and ~60 comments on HN so far irrelevant. The
absolute vast majority of growth are going into SaaS, aka Microsoft's
Exchange, Dynamic 365, Office 365, SalesForce etc....

What about IaaS?

>IaaS...., will also be the fastest growing category of cloud spending with a
five-year CAGR of 32.0%.

That is great. Until you look at the number closely,

>China will experience the fastest growth in public cloud services spending
over the five-year forecast period with a 49.1% CAGR. Latin America will also
deliver strong public cloud spending growth with a 38.3% CAGR.

What that means is that the CAGR, while impressive, will mostly be focused on
market that are not current well served, China, India, Latin America, South
East Asia. Of Course Europe and NA are also growing, but likely at a
comparatively lower pace.

All these are 3 years from now, a very short period of time in terms of
infrastructure building. Is this far too late in the Game for Facebook? Do
they have a long terms sustainability plan? As we have been shown again and
again, Enterprise Tech moves _very_ slowly and tends to stick with big brand
or long time partners. One can look at Google Vs Microsoft as example.

It seems the money right now is on HPC, AI, Scientific Computing, Deep
Learning, all these seems to have infinite appetite of computation power that
even with 1.4nm by 2026 the performance still would not have satisfy needs.

But what about normal Web Server usage? Are we close to its peak?

The growth in Cloud is partly ( or mostly ) driven by Smartphone, the world
went from 1.5 billion internet user using it during free time to near 5
billion user using it _All_ the time. Smartphone sales, and user growth has
slow down, IaaS usually being lagging behind in supply, are we nearing the end
of the growth curve? ( Excluding Scientific Computing Needs )

Remember a lot of these are talking in Dollar terms, 3 years from now the same
dollar should have bought you 50% more computational power. And that is
excluding any possible disruption from ARM.

[1]
[https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719](https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45340719)

------
kabapadum
It is. For some of the partners, they do provide a cloud solution and at much
reduced price compared to AWS.

ps: i think it will be public cloud someday

~~~
cameronbrown
Woah. Got more info on this?

------
zapttt
because everyone there was hired from yahoo and other "portals".

really.

those folks have a natural tendency to fatten the middle management layer and
focus on buzzwords that shake the core business (mobile! vr!) and feature
creeping until the product is so broken it dies. all while killing the few
trully tech/innovative teams.

------
Finnucane
Are they not storing enormous quantities of people's data in the cloud?

~~~
saagarjha
It doesn't sell those [edit: cloud] services to others.

~~~
numlock86
Isn't that their core service?

~~~
ink_13
No, their core service is selling ads.

You can't actually buy anyone's data from Facebook, you can only buy ad
targeting.

~~~
numlock86
Oh, okay. I was just confused because whenever I read something about Facebook
it was about them selling everyone's data.

------
monkin
They are in the empire business, and the best empire for them are human
vegetables.

------
kick
One thing I like about Facebook, evil aside, is how Zuckerberg-centric it
seems. They spent two billion on Oculus because Zuckerberg liked Ready Player
One and thinks the chance of that is awesome. Zuckerberg publicly released a
machine learning project in college and now Facebook is spending more on
machine learning than anyone.

If you had effectively infinite money to make any idea you can think of into
reality, would you use it building cool things that you are personally
interested in, or would you use it to start another cloud company dedicated to
prices so high it's practically highway robbery?

It would make sense if Facebook was ran by Larry Ellison, but money is pretty
pointless as an end itself.

~~~
saagarjha
I think you're putting too much narrative into this.

~~~
kick
I don't think so; it seems like most of Facebook's decision-making in terms of
expansion is arbitrary and whim-based. He admitted to that being the reason he
bought Oculus.

~~~
saagarjha
It's possible that they are less focused than similar companies, but I would
expect that it takes more to seal an acquisition than Mark Zuckerberg just
going "let's buy that company, they look cool" and it being done.

------
rshnotsecure
Facebook's data center planning team for the last several years has been
steered pretty effectively by engineers from "the Seven Sons of National
Defense".

This is a term from the US Intelligence Community that refers to the 7 most
prestigious universities in China that support the People's Liberation Army.
This includes "Beinhang University" and "Northwest Polytechnical University".
These schools are closer to the Army in China than say Westpoint is to the
Army in the US. These schools guarantee some of the best paying jobs in all of
China, and if you desire, a chance to reach the upper strata of the CCP
hierarchy. For this, reasonably I think too, they expect a pretty large amount
of loyalty measured in decades.

They have overruled consistently (there is nothing wrong with this I am just
saying there were objections often) to massive capital infrastructures that
make no sense in Facebook and that has always driven the finance people wild.

I don't think there is a conspiracy here. I do think that a lot of specific
Chinese hardware manufacturers have gotten very very rich off of these
decisions. Their architectural decisions are certainly really strange. They
tripled-down on blueray DVD storage in 2009, even though massive cheap flash,
then NVMe, then NVMe EVO Plus rolled out in quick succession.

I recommend this report and web app from the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute: [https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/](https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/).

