Can Facebook Run on AWS? Analyzing Server Capacity, Costs & Feasibility
This article explores whether Facebook could be hosted on AWS by estimating Facebook's server count, comparing hardware performance, evaluating software compatibility, and calculating the massive cost implications, ultimately concluding that while technically possible, it would be far more expensive than maintaining its own data centers.
Server Capacity
Facebook’s exact server count is undisclosed, but estimates suggest 180,000 servers in 2012 and a rapid growth rate exceeding Moore's law. Three calculation methods (users per server, revenue per server, employees per server) converge on an estimated 830,000 servers for 2017.
Server Hardware Performance
Facebook’s custom‑designed servers are highly optimized for efficiency, featuring stripped‑down components and specialized cold‑storage for rarely accessed media. AWS also designs its own hardware, but to match Facebook’s performance a migration would likely require about 10% more servers, raising the count to roughly 913,000.
Software Situation
Facebook relies heavily on open‑source software, using PHP with the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) and a heavily modified MySQL cluster backed by memcached. While HHVM can run on AWS Linux, the scale of Facebook’s MySQL deployment would be challenging to replicate with Amazon RDS, potentially requiring a custom solution.
Hosting Cost
Based on rough assumptions, hosting an equivalent Facebook workload on AWS would cost about $5.98 billion per year (≈$4.98 billion per month), far exceeding Facebook’s own infrastructure expenses. These figures are speculative and assume full‑capacity usage of EC2, S3, and RDS resources.
Can Facebook be Hosted on AWS?
Technically, AWS could provide the raw server capacity needed, and additional servers could compensate for any performance gaps. However, software migration would be complex, and the cost would be substantially higher than Facebook’s current self‑hosted model.
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