The enterprise engineering organization at Facebook currently manages almost 30,000 computers and close to 40,000 mobile devices. Most of the laptops and desktops run OS X, but there are also about 8,000 Windows machines involved. “After you get to a certain size, there aren’t a lot of turnkey solutions you can buy from vendors,” McSpadden notes.
So the team uses a lot of open source tools and builds its own when necessary. McSpadden argues that vendors tend to build their solutions for mainstream use cases, but there are always edge cases, and, at the scale of a company like Facebook, those edge cases can quickly add up and drain the IT team’s productivity.
The team decided on open sourcing these Adobe-centric tools because it’s such a widely used vendor and because it has such a wide audience. Facebook’s scripts allow enterprise organizations to easily add new accounts to their Adobe subscription (which at this scale is likely based on an enterprise agreement), give specific users access to certain tools and remove that access again when necessary.
