Facebook has some of the largest data-centers in the world, with plenty of spare capacity. In the article they describe that running these HUGE jobs put them at risk of not potentially not being able to provide power to all the machines at once.
If you're thinking they could have just started up a ec2 job to process a billion videos, I really doubt there's any cloud solution in the world right now that can handle this scale without capacity planning before hand.
If you're thinking they could have just started up a ec2 job to process a billion videos, I really doubt there's any cloud solution in the world right now that can handle this scale without capacity planning before hand.