I'm surprised that nobody mentioned why whatsapp started with Erlang in the first place. They started out with an open source xmpp package. The most popular one

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned why whatsapp started with Erlang in the first place. They started out with an open source xmpp package. The most popular one at the time happened to be written in Erlang (ejabberd). There was no masterplan to scale to close to a billion accounts. As it happens, Erlang is an excellent platform upon which to build a message exchange service. Also, the article doesn't mention their completely non-traditional approach to ops. Despite the conventional wisdom in the valley, they run their own servers. And squeeze an enormous amount of value from a small number of servers. Their unique ops strategy is probably as much a part of their success as simply using Erlang. http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183453526efsf2014whatsappscaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183...