Tens of thousands of extra servers. Perhaps over one hundred thousand. There are 95 million photos and videos uploaded every day.

No one said that you need to rewrite everything tomorrow but would it worth migrating over several years? Maintaining 100,000 servers vs 10,000 servers has a cost.

Maybe this story is simply a warning to new startups?

When you listen to the guy who says don't worry about it until you get to the point where it's too late.

> There are 95 million photos uploaded every day.

I'd be surprised if the upload service was all Python.

> would it worth migrating over several years?

No. The cost of developers (and the potential risk of adding bugs) means it would be infeasible.

It's far, far cheaper for Facebook to figure out how to speed up Python (they did something similar for PHP with HHVM).

What about the environmental impact? 10k servers use a lot more energy than 100k

The folks at Facebook know programming and teach lot of us about that. They know how scale distributed system, what parts to write in Python, Go, or just Assembly. They also built new network architecture to optimize utilization of all links at scale, open compute systems for large scale DCs. So let us just appreciate and learn from what they have to share.

No, I do not or did not work at FB. Also do not use FB. But I learn from their writing.

So ask for a carbon tax. That'll sort it.