Why doesn ' t Facebook provide public Cloud Service

This is my answer to a zhihu question why doesn ' t Facebook provide public Cloud Service:

1. Public cloud was an enterprise market and while FB was purely a consumer company now.

It has-to-start from 0 in terms of customer relationship. While Amazon, MS and IBM has been playing in the enterprise market for tens of years. It would is a fundamental shift for FB in all aspects. Building a public cloud was a huge system engineering instead of a single point of technology as an sophisticated algorit Hm. It won't happen in one or both month, it requires many years of huge investment before being.

As an example, Google had a hard time entering the "public cloud", because in the early days they lags behind in enter Prise customer facing features, and they need to start from 0 to establish customer relationships. But, I ' m optimistic about the future of Google Cloud for their long term competitive advantage in infrastructure (datacent ER technology and software stack), user-facing features is short term advantages which can be easily caught on a short Period of time.

2. FB have no competitive advantage over other providers.

Amazon is the market leader with largest market share and richest features. Ms has huge existing customers on Ms Stack. Google has the State-of-the-art infrastructure (Datacenter technology + software stack). FB can ' t compete in any aspect.

3. Cloud is an ecosystem.

Amazon, MS and Google is unique in one or another, they ' ll has their own ecosystems, like IOS vs Android in the Mobi Le world today. Once ecosystems is formed, no chance for new comers with the same generation technology. My estimation is the ecosystems would be formed in 5 years, it's too late for FB.

4. The culture of FB is pretty much a top-down style, which are not a long term advantage.

This is actually related to the question, but I consider important.

In the early days, they has a slogan "Move Fast and break things". Top-down style means focus on user-facing features, choose whatever the convenient technologies/tools to meet. The upside is it allows-quickly develop a feature a iterate incrementally over time. It's mostly correct for a SNS company as the time-to-market was critical for them. But the downside of top-down are the IT doesn ' t establish long term competitive advantage in fundamentals. In contrast, the culture of Google are bottom-up, it builds stuff layer by layer, every layer is reusable, every layer adds Value. Here's a little bit comparison of infrastructure stack between Google and FB what's does it take for Google to work at scal E.

At the end, I-d like-to-highlight that innovation often happens in a bottom-up the. People might has dreamed iPhone before Steve Jobs made it in, but it's only a dream, because every new stuff stands On the shoulder of the old stuff, only when the supporting technologies is ready, you can start doing the next big thing.

Why doesn ' t Facebook provide public Cloud Service