After reading the Time magazine “Person of the Year” article (about Mark Zuckerberg), it occurred to me that I’d never really explored Facebook’s scale and the techniques used to achieve it. After a brief search, I found the following concise and informative overview of the “Facebook” stack. For a scale-geek like me, this was gold and I stayed up way too late drilling down into each link. I already knew about or had used many of these components, but the sheer size of the implementation at Facebook is staggering, and the creativity in which they are developed, employed and modified these components is noteworthy.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/
What really impressed me is that, even though the underlying components are often very sophisticated, the overall architecture is very straightforward and adheres to the architectural premise of “simplify, simplify, simplify”…
Kudos to the Facebook team, and thanks to the folks at pingdom for compiling this information.
