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Ask HN: Why doesn't Facebook sell developer tools?

by kva on 8/31/20, 7:04 PM with 9 comments

• by jamesmishra on 8/31/20, 10:44 PM

  I hate to speculate, given that I don't have individual insight about Facebook. However, I did work on developer-facing products at Uber and learned a bit about what it takes for such a product to succeed or fail.

  Ultimately, the success of AWS-like developer tools depends almost entirely on executive buy-in--maybe even more so than product-market fit. Amazon is unique in the the executives at the top clearly believe in giving AWS everything it needs to succeed. Other companies are often run by executives either don't believe in the business value of developer tools or they're unwilling to commit the resources for any developer-facing product to succeed.

  Facebook is an interesting example in that they open-source such great technology even purchased https://parseplatform.org/ in 2013, but they shut down and open-sourced Parse a few years later. I'm guessing that the execs at the top didn't feel that the business value of Parse was worth the ops burden.

  A few years ago, Steve Yegge wrote about the differences between Amazon and Google in how they thought about developer platforms[1]. A lot has changed since then--Google+ is no more and Google Cloud is a much bigger business, but Yegge's post describes a dilemma that all consumer-facing companies have.

  [1]: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

• by wallflower on 9/1/20, 7:44 PM

  They did. They bought a great mobile backend called Parse and shut it down. Some of us who had to deal with it still have bad memories.

  > Parse was a mobile backend as a service platform originally developed by the provider Parse, Inc. The company was acquired by Facebook in 2013 and shut down in January 2017.[1][2] Following the announcement in 2016 of the impending shutdown, the platform was subsequently open sourced.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform)

• by logicslave on 8/31/20, 10:24 PM

  haha do you have any idea about running something like AWS? Google who is the king of distributed systems and cloud cannot hold a candle to the operational efficiency of AWS. AWS isnt only great because of the technology, its the dedication to keep that behemoth running reliably at all costs.

• by duxup on 8/31/20, 8:44 PM

  "Be AWS" would mean a huge investment, and even for Facebook competing with AWS could be a huge challenge.

  Facebook is not AWS and being AWS isn't what most their people and management are good at.

• by vilog1 on 8/31/20, 8:42 PM

  It's not their core company goal. They are known for ruthlessly focusing

• by PaulHoule on 8/31/20, 7:41 PM

  Security?

  My son and I were wargaming threats against cloud data centers. Assuming that modern cloud data centers are all multi-building affairs connected with something akin to the 1990's mainframe FICON it is hard to make an impact with conventional weapons, even cluster bombs. Maybe a B-52 can drop a stick each on two buildings and wreck everything.

  If Skynet lights up in us-east-1 even Minuteman is not good enough, you're going to need a lot of warheads just to take down a zone. You'd be wishing they didn't cancel MX.

  Colocation could make a big difference in extreme scenarios of social disorder.