“Facebook has shared the nitty-gritty details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets much like it has shared its software code. The effort by the social network will bring web scale computing to the masses and is a boon for AMD and Intel and the x86 architecture. Sorry ARM.”
Is there a security risk with opening up your designs, be they software or datacentre infrastructure?
Bad people can look at your code/designs and exploit what they find?
Surely they’re handing the baddies sweets on a plate?
</deliberately provactive>
I would think there’s a lot less at risk with hardware, since a lot of Facebook’s innovations are around ease of maintenance and energy consumption. What would be of interest to a black hat isn’t really interesting in this case because it’s vanilla x86.
I didn’t see anything earth-shattering, mostly just stuff like:
switch (app.name)
{
case “FarmVille”:
sendToBigIron(app);
break;
case “Mafia Wars”:
sendToUnixServers(app);
break;
default:
sendToCelerons(app);;
}
Only if it’s a bad design.
See previous answer.
See previous answer.
Why would anybody expect facebook to powered by arm chips? Are there even any arm servers shipping yet?
I wasn’t sure. ARM wants to be in this market that is for sure. So I checked, I did found them:
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ZT-Systems-R1801e-/
While I was looking I also found this statement by ARM:
“However, that will take time, East said, predicting that ARM won’t start to eat into Intel’s dominant server market share until 2014 or so.”
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ARMs-Warren-East-touts-serv…
Edited 2011-04-09 23:58 UTC
Facebook? Open? Ha.
When did Facebook release source code and what was it for?
Quite a lot actually…see here: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/