What makes Facebook do what it does? By Gavin Mais

Facebook is a social networking website that operates and owned by Facebook, Inc. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg

  Memcached  HipHop for PHP  Haystack  BigPipe  Cassandra  Scribe  Hadoop and Hive  Thrift  Varnish Types of Databases Facebook Uses:

  Memcached is a distributed memory caching system which Facebook uses as a caching layer between the web servers and MySQL servers.  Facebook runs thousands of Memcached servers with tens of terabytes of cached data at any one point in time. Memcached

  PHP which is another term for Hypertext Preprocessor, a scripting language is slow when it comes to codes that runs on a basic server.  HipHop converts PHP into C++ code which then helps for better performance. This allows Facebook to get much more out of its web servers. HipHop for PHP

  Haystack is Facebook’s high-performance photo storage/retrieval system. Haystack is an object store, Facebook serves around 1.2 million photos per second. Haystack

  BigPipe is a dynamic web page serving system Facebook has developed. They use it to serve each web page in sections for the best performance. BigPipe

  Cassandra is a distributed storage system with no single point of failure. Facebook uses it for its inbox search, it is one of the younger ones for the NoSQL movement. Cassandra

  Scribe is a flexible logging system that Facebook uses for a large amount of purposes internally. It is made for handling logging at a large scale for Facebook. Scribe

  Hadoop is an open source map- reduce execution that makes it possible to do calculations on a massive amount of data. Facebook uses this for data analysis.  Hive came from within Facebook which makes it possible to use SQL queries against Hadoop. Hadoop and Hive

  Thrift is an internally developed cross-language framework that ties all different languages together making them able to talk to each other. For example PHP, Erlang, Java and C++. Thrift

  Varnish is an HTTP accelerator which acts as a load balancer and also a cache content which can then be served fast. Facebook uses it to serve photos and profile pictures, handling billions of requests everyday. Varnish

 Data Center Database

  Pingdom (2010). Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site. Retrieved May 9, from behind-facebook/ behind-facebook/  Wills, D., & Reeves, S. (2009). Facebook as a political weapon: Information in social networks. British Politics, 4 (2), doi: /bp  “Data Center Databases” Work Cited