Strategy
Facebook has been so reliable that when a site outage does occur it's a definite learning opportunity. Fortunately for us we can learn something because in More Details on Today's Outage, Facebook's Robert Johnson gave a pretty candid explanation of what caused a rare
Example
Peter Alguacil at Pingdom wrote a HighScalability worthy article on Facebook's architecture: Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site. It covers the challenges Facebook faces, the software Facebook uses, and the techniques Facebook uses to keep on scaling. Definitely worth a look.
Strategy
Aditya Agarwal, Director of Engineering at Facebook, gave an excellent Scale at Facebook talk that covers their architecture, but the talk is really more about how to scale an organization by preserving the best parts of its culture. The key take home of the talk is: You can get the
Example
Several readers had follow-up questions in response to this article. Luke's responses can be found in How FarmVille Scales - The Follow-up. If real farming was as comforting as it is in Zynga's mega-hit Farmville then my family would have probably never left those harsh North
Example
How do you scale a viral Facebook app that has skyrocketed to a mind boggling 65 million installs (the population of France)? That's the fortunate problem BuddyPoke co-founder Dave Westwood has and he talked about his solution at Wednesday's Facebook Meetup. Slides for the complete talk
Strategy
When you are on the bleeding edge of scale like Facebook is, you run into some interesting problems. As of 2008 Facebook had over 800 memcached servers supplying over 28 terabytes of cache. With those staggering numbers it's a fair bet to think they've seen their
Example
Real-time social graphs (connectivity between people, places, and things). That's why scaling Facebook is hard says Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook. Social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, and Twitter are simply harder than traditional websites to scale. Why is that? Why would social networking sites
Database
Update 2: Presentation from the NoSQL conference: slides, video. Update: Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table by Jonathan Ellis. Why I think Cassandra is the most promising of the open-source distributed databases --you get a relatively rich data model and a
Hadoop
This post about using Hive and Hadoop for analytics comes straight from Facebook engineers. Scalable analysis on large data sets has been core to the functions of a number of teams at Facebook - both engineering and non-engineering. Apart from ad hoc analysis and business intelligence applications used by analysts
Hadoop
Facebook has the second largest installation of Hadoop (a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data), Yahoo being the first. Learn how they do it and what are the challenges on DBMS2 blog, which is a blog for people who care
MySQL
Facebook's engg. director aditya talks about facebook architecture. How they use mysql, php and memcache. How they have modified the above to suit their requirements.
jobs
I thought with the job situation these days that people might be interested in some open jobs at Facebook. Here's what's available: