Facebook Infrastructure

Facebook is one example of social networking media site that succeed in scaling their system. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers is to keep the site up and running smoothly inspite of handling more than half a billion active users.

During the scaling process, these are some of the open source infrastructure technologies developed inside Facebook:

Apache Cassandra is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size across many commodity servers, with no single point of failure.

Apache Hive is data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop that provides tools to enable easy data summarization, adhoc querying and analysis of large datasets.

FlashCache is a general purpose writeback block cache for Linux. It was developed as a loadable Linux kernel module, using the Device Mapper and sits below the filesystem.

HipHop for PHP transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++. HipHop offers large performance gains and was developed over the past two years.

Open Compute Project an open hardware project aims to accelerate data center and server innovation while increasing computing efficiency through collaboration on relevant best practices and technical specifications.

Scribe is a scalable service for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers.

Thrift provides a framework for scalable cross-language services development in C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking web server framework written in Python. It is designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.