How Facebook operations got 10 times faster while getting 10 times bigger.

How Facebook operations got 10 times faster while getting 10 times bigger.

Turns out it's hard to run a social network with 2.2 billion people.

Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of engineering and infrastructure, speaks at the company's Systems@Scale conference.Stephen Shankland/CNET

Maybe you've heard of Facebook's old engineering mantra: Move fast and break things. The company dumped the "break things" part years ago, but today it's moving faster than ever.

At its own Systems@Scale conference Thursday, Facebook engineers detailed several parts of a computing infrastructure massive enough to serve the 2.2 billion people who use Facebook. One of those details: Facebook now updates its service's core software at least 10 times more frequently than it did about a decade ago.

"When I joined Facebook in 2009, we pushed [an update to] that main application tier ... once a day. That was an epic thing," said Jay Parikh, Facebook's head of engineering and infrastructure. Now, though, the site "is getting pushed maybe every one or two hours," he said.

And updates come faster even though Facebook has more than 10 times as many servers in its data centers, 20 times the engineers updating its software and more than 10 times the users it did a decade ago, he said. Oh, and it's got more than a billion people using Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger now, too.
A lot of people use Facebook services, so updating it is "scary," says engineering and infrastructure chief Jay Parikh.Stephen Shankland/CNET

The glimpse into Facebook's inner workings is unusual. In other industries -- say, banking or railroads or automaking -- this kind of operational detail can be information tightly protected to keep competitors from getting an edge. But in the tech industry, it can actually help a company get ahead.

Opening up helps the technology ecosystem -- hardware, software and the people who put it all together -- keep up better with Facebook's needs. The problems Facebook finds are likely to be the ones others in the industry encounter as they grow, too.

Facebook has had to work hard to speed things up when the natural tendency of organizations is to slow down to guard against the increased risks of change as projects grow larger, Parikh said. To get there, Facebook's operations mission is now "move fast with stable infra."
Tools to run tech companies at massive scale

At the conference, engineers from Facebook and other tech companies, like Amazon, Shopify, Lyft, Google and Yahoo gave talks and asked questions of their peers. These are folks for whom operating a data centre packed with thousands of servers is last decade's challenge. Today's difficulties span multiple data centres around the globe -- how do you synchronize data or get a second data centre to take over when there's a problem with the first?

Read More on https://www.cnet.com/news/how-facebook-operations-got-10-times-faster-while-getting-10-times-bigger/

This post is from https://www.cnet.com