Source for Cloudflare getting systems built by Quanta.
Full comment
> Even putting aside that the computer tech part of the business isn't their core competency, custom hardware is hard. Hmmm. Good point. (Maybe I scared OP away, heh.) > Is there an example of any large company, other than Google, who has mastered this? Well, I certainly don't know. I've heard Cloudflare gets their systems made, for some definition of "from scratch", by Quanta. Presumably there's a bit of a decision-making process in there, and presumably Quanta handles everything related to the "why is the devkit sample broken again #51383" side of things and ships a more or less finished product (maybe even with finished enclosures). My reference point for this knowledge is this video (2015). Regarding SAS, maybe past a certain ordering quantity (or anything similar that would reveal a massive operation) the market would expect certain behavior like requesting value-adds, ordering with only one supplier, or other things that would generate lock-in. I of course have absolutely no idea [if this sort of thinking is reasonable]. Your points about commodity at scale sound quite reasonable. (You clearly have more experience than I do, which is kind of zero, heh.) As for suspicion about summaries and conclusions, well, (tangential example) the radial graph on link (the one from Forrester) doesn't show GitHub :D Yeah, building own hardware is sadly still within the realm of over-specialization at this point. I guess this is because 4+-layer PCB printing is still eye-watering so the