Comment by Ansil849
5 years ago
> The backbone is the network Facebook has built to connect all our computing facilities together, which consists of tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centers.
This makes it sound like Facebook has physically laid "tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centers". Is this in fact true?
Yes, although undoubtedly a lot of this is shared investment - https://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-giant-unders...
https://datacenterfrontier.com/facebook-will-begin-selling-w...
Likely a mixture of bought, leased, and self laid fiber. This is not at all uncommon and basically necessary if you have your own data center.