When I read Steven Baker’s write-up on Facebook’s server farm–10,000 servers and counting–I was amazed. Why the heck does Facebook need that many servers? It isn’t apparent to me that Facebook needs more than a few hundred servers. Some other commenters observed the same. But perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye.
Google’s server infrastructure was covered in Business Week’s Google and the Wisdom of Clouds in December 2007. I was awed by the huge amounts of money being spent to build their server infrastructure. Even the electric bill is running $25MM/year per datacenter! Nevertheless, it makes sense for them: Google runs a huge number of applications, and making their server infrastructure available to developers is a big new business for them. Amazon discovered the same thing–why not make the cloud available to everyone, and profit from the world’s hunger for server capacity?
The biggest “problem” with Facebook’s f8 platform (that’s the platform for creating Facebook applications) is that you need to provide your own servers. This has led to quality-of-service issues with a lot of applications, and also creates another barrier to getting developers to make things for you.Might Facebook be ramping up server capacity because they plan to enter the cloud business as well? It would make a hell of a lot of sense. They’ve got a platform for building social applications with a built-in distribution model; if they could also integrate it with ability to offer flexible scaling of server capacity, then they’ve got a win-win with developers that could potentially leapfrog Amazon and Google’s clouds.
I have no idea of Facebook’s intentions, but this certainly suggests some of the amazing possibilities with social media businesses as they continue to scale.
