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by mapme 1534 days ago
I think that’s a large oversimplification of Facebook. While it’s true a lot of FB storage is MySQL backed they also created many complex systems such as:

- Cassandra (based on dynamo/big table)

- wrote a custom KV store named RocksDb that is open source/now a company

- wrote a custom photos storage system that replaced an NFS based design

- wrote another custom binary object store

- wrote a custom geo distributed graph db (Tao)

- wrote an in house distributed FS replacement for HDFS

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi10/tech/full_papers/...

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14...

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc13/atc13-b...

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~wlloyd/papers/tectonic-fast21....

https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...

1 comments

I think all of this was after their first billion users?
Cassandra was released in 2008. Facebook hit 1 billion users ~ 2012, and 2 billion ~ 2017. Back when Cassandra was released, they had a 'mere' 100 million users.

Facebook stats:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

Thanks for the correction! So the more correct statement would be that Facebook scaled to 100 million users with PHP, MySQL, and Memcache, and then to a billion users with Cassandra and Haystack, and then built all the other stuff after their first billion?
Yeah, there’s also a lag sometimes ie. They write the paper 1-2 years after building the system. They’ve published some really interesting papers over time. If you filter by year you can see them all!

https://research.facebook.com/publications/