In this video interview, Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with about managing Facebook’s hypergrowth. Heiliger is a rock star infrastructure geek. He was the CTO of Global Crossing at age 23, worked at Marc Andreessen’s Loudcloud and spent time as the head of Web engineering at Walmart.com.
During the interview, Heiliger said that Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. “It’s almost a new challenge every day,” Heiliger said regarding the challenges of keeping up with the growth in users–about 250,000 new users per day. He said that Facebook is considering building its own data centers, but for now is renting.
Facebook plans open-source platform to assist application developers. Facebook said that as the new Platform continues to mature, open sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem.
Facebook has announced it will make its third-party developer platform open source which could be a huge step toward breaking down the wall between its site and the rest of the web.
“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon,” a spokesperson said.
Applications developed on the Facebook Platform would be compatible with any social network that maps its application programming interfaces (APIs) to Facebook.
Facebook has been sending out mixed signals after cutting off Google’s Friend Connect, but it also just announced a feature called Facebook Connect, which lets users access their Facebook identity on any site.
Google Inc. is expected to shed light on its own social technologies such as Google App Engine, for building and hosting Web applications, and OpenSocial, the Google-backed application programming interface (API) for social networking. Continue Reading »
