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"We estimate that Facebook has 830,000 servers in 2017." No way this can be true. Facebook scaled primarily using CDNs like Akamai. Akamai is the largest CDN
by jaypaulynice 9y ago
"We estimate that Facebook has 830,000 servers in 2017."
No way this can be true. Facebook scaled primarily using CDNs like Akamai. Akamai is the largest CDN in the world and has no more than 300k-350k servers all over the world. It's one of the largest distributed system in the world. I worked there, so I know this for sure.
Facebook has recently been moving their data in house, but they do not have 830,000 servers. That's almost 3 times Akamai. At this point, Facebook would be more profitable letting people use their server infrastructure instead of using it for themselves.
Running Facebook over AWS is a CDN problem that was solved by Akamai!
- tanilama 9y agoServers might not be just for serving. Facebook likely have huge clusters for offline computation/analytics/machine learning stuff. In order to process the logs at their scale, I won't be surprised if they have hadoop cluster that scales over several thousand even 10k nodes, or multiple clusters.
- crispytx 9y agoYeah I thought that math sounded a little fuzzy myself.
- origami777 9y ago<insert "when you're a hammer..." joke here> Not to be a jerk, but, running Facebook over AWS is not a CDN problem. That's crazy talk. There are far more Facebook requirements that AWS can meet that Akamai cannot. You have to look beyond their content delivery reqs. Also, they could absolutely have 800k servers. I don't think comparing their size to Akamai is fair. The requirements of each company are drastically different. Do I think the 830k is accurate? No, but only because these estimates are usually wrong (unless informed by an inside source).
- jaypaulynice 9y agoAkamai handles 15-30% of all web traffic on any given day with 200k-300k servers...does Facebook have that kind of load in a day? The problem is mostly a CDN one, crunching data and writing to the servers are second to actually serving users fast. For example, I don't necessarily need to see the latest posts, comments, etc. so you can queue up the writing and sync data later, but when I hit fb.com, I have to see stuff...
- ADefenestrator 9y agoI think working for Akamai you're looking at things in a rather CDN-centric sort of way, but shuffling bits around is a relatively small percentage of what Facebook does. Actually doing things with the data beyond serving it up takes a lot more servers. The "CDN-equivalent" servers in PoPs etc for FB are a a pretty small percentage of the total, and the bulk are things like web/cache/search/DB servers.