February 10, 2011 - Harry Li, Facebook

Title: Scaling Facebook

Abstract:
Facebook has grown at an incredible rate in recent years. In October 2007, Facebook had 50 million active users---distinct users who have logged into the website in the past month. 10 months later, the active user account reached 100 million. An additional 9 months after that (April 2009), the active user count climbed to 200 million. In July 2010, Facebook hit 500 million active users.

In this talk, I will discuss how Facebook's infrastructure has evolved to scale with such explosive growth from the early days of a single cluster to its current architecture that spans across multiple clusters and two coasts. I will explain how our web machines interact with memcache and MySQL and highlight the mechanisms we use to ensure that your data remains consistent within a cluster, across co-located clusters, and across geographically separated clusters.