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(Former Facebook employee) The VAST majority of online serving code at Facebook is written in Hack (PHP) and is part of a gigantic codebase called fbwww. Backe

(Former Facebook employee) The VAST majority of online serving code at Facebook is written in Hack (PHP) and is part of a gigantic codebase called fbwww. Backend services that do heavy lifting (mostly search, feed ranking, ad matching, TAO, various caches, proxies, etc) are fairly light on business logic and written in C++. It isn't a microservices architecture at all: they only move stuff to C++ for latency and efficiency reasons. For instance most of the ad stack is written in Hack, but certain key pieces use C++ for better performance. I'm not aware of any Java or Go code that is part of the online serving stack.

geggam 9y ago
Do you know of any place actually using microservices at scale ? ( 400 Million + users )
- closeparen 9y ago
  Your definition of "at scale" doesn't seem to leave room for Amazon, Netflix, or Uber (all in tens to low hundreds of million monthly active users according to a cursory Google search) but... those.
  - geggam 9y ago
    Guess my perspective of scale is different. Its just an observation of having worked on systems at scale and I dont see the microservices / containers used. I am curious if anyone else has. The more I am around containers and the network complexity/issues that are created the less I am convinced it is the most optimal way and I am looking for opinions that differ from mine so I can learn
    - pc86 9y ago
      Only about 3.2 million people have the internet (as of 2015). Your definition of scale is 12.5% of the entire connected world or more? This is like the guy in these threads saying $400k a year for a software engineer is "market rate" and/or "easily achievable."
    - closeparen 9y ago
      In my experience, these issues are minor when your large company has an infrastructure team dedicated to the service substrate (CI, self-service incremental deploys, service discovery and routing, standard RPC layer, canonical repository of IDL files, standard messaging layer, persistent storage as a service, time series collection, dashboarding, alerting, distributed tracing, safe internal and external nginx configs, etc). Microservices are probably a bad idea (for now) if you aren't large enough for such a team. But you've constructed your question to exclude the companies that work this way, which I think any reasonable person would call "at scale."
  - kevan 9y ago
    Counting website users isn't a great metric for Amazon because a lot of the traffic is from AWS. But Amazon has been successfully running on a service oriented architecture for about 15 years now.

geggam 9y ago

Do you know of any place actually using microservices at scale ? ( 400 Million + users )

closeparen 9y ago
Your definition of "at scale" doesn't seem to leave room for Amazon, Netflix, or Uber (all in tens to low hundreds of million monthly active users according to a cursory Google search) but... those.
- geggam 9y ago
  Guess my perspective of scale is different. Its just an observation of having worked on systems at scale and I dont see the microservices / containers used. I am curious if anyone else has. The more I am around containers and the network complexity/issues that are created the less I am convinced it is the most optimal way and I am looking for opinions that differ from mine so I can learn
  - pc86 9y ago
    Only about 3.2 million people have the internet (as of 2015). Your definition of scale is 12.5% of the entire connected world or more? This is like the guy in these threads saying $400k a year for a software engineer is "market rate" and/or "easily achievable."
  - closeparen 9y ago
    In my experience, these issues are minor when your large company has an infrastructure team dedicated to the service substrate (CI, self-service incremental deploys, service discovery and routing, standard RPC layer, canonical repository of IDL files, standard messaging layer, persistent storage as a service, time series collection, dashboarding, alerting, distributed tracing, safe internal and external nginx configs, etc). Microservices are probably a bad idea (for now) if you aren't large enough for such a team. But you've constructed your question to exclude the companies that work this way, which I think any reasonable person would call "at scale."
- kevan 9y ago
  Counting website users isn't a great metric for Amazon because a lot of the traffic is from AWS. But Amazon has been successfully running on a service oriented architecture for about 15 years now.