Moving Fast with Software Verification

November 20, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Moving Fast with Software Verification - Calcagno et al. 2015 This is a story of transporting ideas from recent theoretical research in reasoning about programs into the fast-moving engineering culture of Facebook. The context is that most of the authors landed at Facebook in September of 2013, when we brought the INFER static analyser with ... Continue Reading

Fail at Scale & Controlling Queue Delay

November 19, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Controlling Queue Delay - Nichols & Van Jacobsen, 2012, and Fail at Scale - Maurer, 2015 Fail at Scale (Maurer) Ben Maurer recently wrote a great article for ACM Queue on how Facebook achieves reliability in the face of rapid change: To keep Facebook reliable in the face of rapid change we study common patterns ... Continue Reading

Existential Consistency: Measuring and Understanding Consistency at Facebook

October 19, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Existential Consistency: Measuring and Understanding Consistency at Facebook - Lu et al. 2015 At the core of this paper is an analysis of the number of anomalies seen in Facebook's production system for clients of TAO, which is impressively low under normal operation (0.0004%) - to interpret that number of course, we'll have to dig ... Continue Reading

Holistic Configuration Management at Facebook

October 16, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

Holistic Configuration Management at Facebook - Tang et al. (Facebook) 2015 This paper gives a comprehensive description of the use cases, design, implementation, and usage statistics of a suite of tools that manage Facebook’s conﬁguration end-to-end, including the frontend products, backend systems, and mobile apps. The configuration for Facebook's site is updated thousands of times ... Continue Reading

The Mystery Machine: End-to-end performance analysis of large-scale internet services

October 7, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

The Mystery Machine: End-to-end performance analysis of large-scale internet services - Chow et al. 2014 Google's Dapper paper is very well known, but Facebook's Mystery Machine seems to be much less well known - and that's a shame because I have a hunch the approach could be very relevant to many people. Current debugging and ... Continue Reading

Fast Database Restarts at Facebook

September 14, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Fast Database Restarts at Facebook - Goel et al. 2014 In security, you're only as secure as your weakest link in the chain. When it comes to agility, you're only as fast as your slowest link in the chain. Updating and evolving a stateless middle tier is usually pretty quick, but what if you need ... Continue Reading

Wormhole: Reliable pub-sub to support Geo-Replicated Internet Services

May 14, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Wormhole: Reliable pub-sub to support Geo-Replicated Internet Services - Sharma et al. 2015 At Facebook, lots of applications are interested in data being written to Facebook's data stores. Having each of these applications poll the data stores of interest would be untenable, so Facebook built a pub-sub system to identify updates and transmit notifications to ... Continue Reading

RIPQ: Advanced photo caching on flash for Facebook

February 27, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

RIPQ: Advanced Photo Caching on Flash for Facebook - Tang et al. 2015 It's three for the price of one with this paper: we get to deepen our understanding of the characteristics of flash, examine a number of priority queue and caching algorithms, and get a glimpse into what's behind an important part of Facebook's ... Continue Reading

f4: Facebook’s warm BLOB storage system

December 16, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

f4: Facebook's warm BLOB storage system - Muralidhar et al. 2014 This is a story of system engineering trade-offs, a design informed by data analysis, and hard-won experience. It's the story of how Facebook implemented a tiered storage solution for BLOBs and introduced per data class (temperature) replication factor, latency, and time-to-recovery tuning. If you're ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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