May 1, 2012
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Richard Wareing, a Facebook storage engineer, joined Gluster’s nine-member board as Red Hat tests a new version of the software. Gluster is designed to provide companies a more cost-effective way of managing their ever-rising volume of data using open-source software and commodity hardware.
Having a representative join the board shows Facebook’s interest, says Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
(Full Story: Facebook Monitors Red Hat Software-Only Storage System as Costs Soar – Investors.com)
April 16, 2012
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When Rossi is about to roll out an update, he initiates a checkin procedure on IRC. All of the developers who have submitted code for inclusion in the pending update are notified in the channel and have to respond to verify that they are present and ready for the update to go out.
When a developer doesn’t respond within a few minutes, Rossi can send a command to a bot that will attempt to get the developer’s attention through several different communication channels, including e-mail and text messages. As Rossi explained to me, he typically prefers to have all of the contributing developers on hand when deploying an update.
An important aspect of Facebook’s development culture is the idea that developers are fully responsible for how their code behaves in production. This philosophy mirrors the “DevOps” movement, which encourages lowering the wall between software development and IT operations.
(Full Story: Behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering)
April 5, 2012
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Facebook’s Mark Callaghan, who spent eight years as a “principal member of the technical staff” at Oracle, explained that using open-source software lets Facebook operate with “orders of magnitude” more machines than people, which means lots of money saved on software licenses and lots of time put into working on new features (many of which, including the rather-cool Online Schema Change, are discussed in the talk).
Additionally, he said, the patch and update cycles at companies like Oracle are far slower than what Facebook can get by working on issues internally and with an open-source community. The same holds true for general support issues, which Facebook can resolve itself in hours instead of waiting days for commercial support.
(Full Story: Facebook shares some secrets on making MySQL scale)
January 12, 2012
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The schedule for Timeline was very aggressive. When we sat down to build the system, one of our key priorities was eliminating technical risk by keeping the system as simple as possible and relying on internally-proven technologies. After a few discussions we decided to build on four of our core technologies: MySQL/InnoDB for storage and replication, Multifeed (the technology that powers News Feed) for ranking, Thrift for communications, and memcached for caching. We chose well-understood technologies so we could better predict capacity needs and rely on our existing monitoring and operational tool kits.
(Full Story: Facebook Engineering – Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story)
July 12, 2011
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According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”
(Full Story: Facebook trapped in MySQL ‘fate worse than death’)
April 25, 2011
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(Full Story: Datacenter power use visualized)
April 1, 2011
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When Facebook moved its servers to HipHop for PHP – the code transformer it built to convert PHP into optimized C++ – the company’s average CPU usage dropped by 50 per cent. And after six months of additional engineering, the tool was about 1.8 times faster.
(Full Story: Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware by compiling PHP to C++)
February 14, 2011
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When someone enters a comment, we fetch the viewership information from all of our data centers across the country, combine the information, then push the updates out. In practice, this means we have to perform multiple cross-country reads for every comment produced. But it works because our commenting rate is significantly lower than our viewing rate. Reading globally saves us from having to replicate a high volume of writes across data centers, saving expensive, long-distance bandwidth.
(Full Story: Facebook Live Commenting: Behind the Scenes)
February 9, 2011
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Zeitlin says more than 5 million users downloaded the Farmers Insurance Group airship, and in that time, Farmers’ Facebook fan page went from a handful of fans to more than 120,000.
It’s an example of real corporate money that was well spent in the virtual business world.
(Full Story: Is That An Ad Growing In Your FarmVille Field? : NPR)
February 9, 2011
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Is your current social media presence all over the place? We’ve built a Facebook application designed to get your students engaged, from the point of admission through graduation.
(Full Story: Inigral SchoolsApp – Facebook for Higher Education)
