Who are the web-scale companies, besides FAMGA ?

[Gryz]

Whenever I read about web-scale companies, I always see the same 5 companies mentioned. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple. Sometimes only 4 or 3 are mentioned as examples. But no other company is ever mentioned in that list.

So it seems FAMGA are the tier-1 web-scale companies.

Who do you think are worthy of tier-2 ? I would assume Netflix. Web-scale seems to mean not only big companies, but in particular companies that do or did something new to solve the scaling problem. Netflix certainly did something new. So they could be considered a web-scale company.

Would CloudFlare be big enough ? Could they be considered a web-scale company ?

Any other companies ?

Inquiring minds want to know ...

 

[Genx87]

CDNs? Or are they running on AWS or Azure?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Would dedicated server providers count, some of them have pretty large infrastructure and multiple data centres. Softlayer, Hurricane Electric, etc.

 

[Gryz]

Thanks for the answers. It seems I was correct that it isn't obvious who the web-scale companies are, besides the big 5.

I doubt CDNs don't have their own data-centers. What would be the point if you use the cloud yourself, and your CDN would be in the same location as your own servers ?

But CDNs don't seem to be so big. I thought of CloudFlare (see my original post). But then I saw on some webpage that Akamai is 6x bigger than CloudFlare. I'm not sure, but I think the CDNs are tiny, compared to the MAFGA companies.

Service providers (ISPs, aka the old telcos) are completely different from web-scale companies. First of all they rarely have a global presence like FAMGA. The amount of servers they have usually isn't even close to the number of servers you need to have before you are considered web-scale. Most service providers don't serve content. They would like to, and they have all kinds of tiny projects and initiatives. But they don't do it yet. (And imho they never will). Their servers are nothing compared to what the big guys have. (MS has 1 million servers, and Google is planning for 10 million servers). ISPs do big bandwidth. But they don't generate it, they only transport it.

If I ever think of another company that might conform, I'll let you know. But for now, I really think the MFGAA companies are on a different level than the rest of the world.