Scaling Facebook

Harry Li, Facebook

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.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Harry Li is an infrastructure engineer at Facebook. He is a part of the Datacenters team and works to ensure that Facebook’s architecture continues to scale well with its explosive growth. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Lorenzo Alvisi and Mike Dahlin. Host: Yair Amir, Computer Science.

Note: Harry is visiting us that day and will be available for a few meetings after his talk. E-mail yairamir@cs.jhu.edu if you are interested in meeting with him.