Facebook launches an open source organization and releases new routing tech
Facebook is upping the ante in the open source world, announcing on Monday a new open source technology for routing data across server caches, and also a new open organization (along with other big-name companies) to help foster open source efforts.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act in a pattern Facebook has been building since 2011, when it opened up its servers and data center designs, followed by the 2012 release of Corona for webscale Hadoop. Each step has taken infrastructure Facebook built for its own scale and handed it to the industry.
What is new on September 15, 2014 is twofold: a routing technology for moving data across server caches, and — more structurally — a formal open source organization co-founded with other big-name companies. The pickup across outlets from the New York Times to EnterpriseTech shows the announcement landed well beyond the developer press.
First-order effects
- Other large-scale operators can now adopt Facebook's cache-routing approach rather than building their own, putting Facebook's internal infrastructure choices directly into competitors' stacks.
- The new organization gives Facebook and its co-founding companies a standing vehicle for joint open source work, replacing ad hoc project-by-project releases.
Second-order effects
- Rival web-scale operators face pressure to match the gesture or risk looking closed by comparison — the same dynamic the 2011 server-design release created around hardware.
- Infrastructure vendors and cloud providers gain free access to proven webscale tooling, shifting their build-versus-adopt calculus toward adopting what Facebook has already debugged at extreme scale.
Third-order effects
- If hyperscalers keep donating core infrastructure software, competitive advantage migrates from owning the code to operating it at scale — and industry standards get set by whoever gives the technology away fastest.
- A standing multi-company open source body points toward infrastructure governance becoming institutional rather than per-project, with big operators negotiating direction through shared organizations instead of forks.
The trend: Web-scale companies are systematically converting proprietary infrastructure into open source projects to set standards, attract engineering talent, and shift competition toward operational excellence.