4 ms·

One of my favorite talks is by Rick Reed about scaling Erlang at WhatsApp. What an absolute savage. He flies through an articulate and in-depth curriculum on sy

One of my favorite talks is by Rick Reed about scaling Erlang at WhatsApp. What an absolute savage. He flies through an articulate and in-depth curriculum on system performance and bottleneck mitigation. The talk is called "That's 'Billion' with a 'B'" and makes for a great lunchtime watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs

strmpnk 6y ago
I remember that year. I was giving a talk at EF during the same time slot but the schedule originally had me in the large room and they had a much smaller one. When the news of the acquisition hit, everyone wanted to see the WhatsApp talk. The organizers knew this so we swapped rooms. So, I started my talk by asking if anyone in the room was here for the WhatsApp talk and told them they could quietly leave and I wouldn't mind and a bunch of people got up. Heheh. I don't blame them. I didn't really like my talk and Rick Reed is very good at what he does and the talk is no exception.
secondcoming 6y ago
I know nothing about Erlang, but I do know high-volume systems. Needing 550 beefy servers to handle all that load is - in my mind - not that impressive.
staticassertion 6y ago
Yeah, not quite related to the linked slides, which are about scaling in terms of productivity, but still a great talk. I really found that "isolation" is just a key optimization and one of the most useful properties of a system, which they call out in that talk. I wrote about it a bit more in depth here: https://www.graplsecurity.com/post/architecting-for-performance-and-security-at-the-same-time https://www.graplsecurity.com/post/architecting-for-performa... I've written our data processing layer and our event orchestration layer as basically an actor oriented system, with push/pull systems in a couple of key places where it makes sense. It's incredible what you can do with strong isolated infrastructure in terms of performance, security, reliability, and quality.

strmpnk 6y ago

I remember that year. I was giving a talk at EF during the same time slot but the schedule originally had me in the large room and they had a much smaller one. When the news of the acquisition hit, everyone wanted to see the WhatsApp talk. The organizers knew this so we swapped rooms. So, I started my talk by asking if anyone in the room was here for the WhatsApp talk and told them they could quietly leave and I wouldn't mind and a bunch of people got up. Heheh. I don't blame them. I didn't really like my talk and Rick Reed is very good at what he does and the talk is no exception.

secondcoming 6y ago

I know nothing about Erlang, but I do know high-volume systems. Needing 550 beefy servers to handle all that load is - in my mind - not that impressive.

staticassertion 6y ago

Yeah, not quite related to the linked slides, which are about scaling in terms of productivity, but still a great talk. I really found that "isolation" is just a key optimization and one of the most useful properties of a system, which they call out in that talk. I wrote about it a bit more in depth here: https://www.graplsecurity.com/post/architecting-for-performance-and-security-at-the-same-time https://www.graplsecurity.com/post/architecting-for-performa... I've written our data processing layer and our event orchestration layer as basically an actor oriented system, with push/pull systems in a couple of key places where it makes sense. It's incredible what you can do with strong isolated infrastructure in terms of performance, security, reliability, and quality.