It takes a lot of resources to run Facebook

If you don't Facebook to run ads and sell info, how do you want them to acquire the money to run it?

Note that this info is almost a year old, so there would be many more users and equipment now.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/11/20/facebook-ops-staffer-manages-20000-servers/

by Rich Miller on November 20, 2013

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Each Facebook data center operations staffer can manage at least 20,000 servers, and for some admins the number can be as high as 26,000 systems, according to Delfina Eberly, Director of Data Center Operations at Facebook.

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Data center operations is a critical skill at Facebook, which now has 1.15 billion users, including 720 million who log in daily. Each day, Facebook users share 4.75 billion content items and “like” 4.5 billion items. The company now stores more than 240 billion photos, and adds 7 petabytes of photo storage each month.

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https://gigaom.com/2013/06/19/did-facebook-finally-let-its-server-count-slip/

By Stacey Higginbotham
Jun. 19, 2013

Facebook has “hundreds of thousands of machines” on its network, according to one of its executives who may have disclosed more than he intended at the GigaOM Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. In an interview with me, Najam Ahmad, director, technical operations, infrastructure, let it slip that the fabric the social networking company is building needs to help it manage “hundreds of thousands of machines.”

This is the closest thing we have to a server count for the social network, which is notoriously secretive about how many boxes it has.

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It’s possible that Ahmad could have been referring to more than just servers: it might include, storage, networking switches and so on. But while the comment isn’t exact, it gets me a lot closer to the server count I have so craved.