6 ms·

This article does very little to explain how they did that. It basically states the type of tech they used (Erlang, FreeBSD and SoftLayer), and something about

This article does very little to explain how they did that. It basically states the type of tech they used (Erlang, FreeBSD and SoftLayer), and something about not trying to over engineer stuff. The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The article is honestly kinda low on details, depth or new insights, but at least it links to some sources.
willejs 5y ago
Theres a high scalability post from years ago that has a bit more information. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
- bjarneh 5y ago
  Thanks, it does seem like choosing a language that was made for doing things in parallel to begin with was a good idea. To be honest, I've always felt that programming in functional languages creates less bugs, but perhaps that's just my imagination.
  - dunefox 5y ago
    It certainly creates fewer bugs of a specific nature, depending on the language.
- vadfa 5y ago
  >19B messages in & 40B out per day whatsapp being a closed system I don't understand how this disparity is possible.
  - the_other 5y ago
    Most people are in group chats.
- aledthemathguy 5y ago
  this is great. wondering if Telegram also have a post similar to this? (unlike whatsapp, they do store the messages)
Closi 5y ago
> The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either. It's something I think we have all seen a lot of times - that by the time a company is serving 1 billion users it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely, and because of that additional abstraction is required and the complexity/LOC skyrockets.
- bjarneh 5y ago
  > it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely But makes little sense (as a developer/engineer myself) to think that growth in users, requires a ton of new developers/engineers. We are not tattoo artists, our job can scale indefinitely if set up properly, i.e. all you should need to scale further (to 1BN or 7BN) should be enough money to buy more hardware; which WhatsApp/Facebook clearly has.
  - Closi 5y ago
    I think that makes sense if the application doesn’t need to also grow much functionally during the expansion, but I believe the more common pattern is more users = more functionality to manage those users, support teams, global legal compliance and accommodate more niche phone systems = more engineers.
  - macintux 5y ago
    You're assuming that their use case & technology stack & application scale cleanly horizontally and they're not spending all their time fighting fires. True in this instance, but far from a universal truth.
- mnsc 5y ago
  "this team of 7 engineers is responsible for formatting the text content of a chat, including alignment and sizes of emojis and gifs" "this team of 4 engineers is responsible for formatting the date of a message" "this team of 7 engineers is responsible for the overall formatting of a chat" "this team of 5 engineers is responsible for the formatting of the non-chat pars of the application, settings, profile page" "this team of 4 ux persons is responsible for aligning the non-technical parts of formatting and the user experience over all parts of the application" "this crossfunctional team of 5 is responsible for creating a framework to let the configuration of formatting be disconnected from the actual implementation of the formatting" "this team of 7 QA engineers will aid in manual verification of changes and bugfixes but will also automate test cases for formatting in the entire application" "this supporting team of 4 will develop automation tools and enable the formatting teams to collaborate in a high speed agile context"
mrweasel 5y ago
The technology stack isn't even that relevant. There have been a few different articles about WhatsApp and their 1B users with only 50 engineers. The key in previous articles was that WhatsApp hired really smart people. Having extremely talented engineers and a rather small scope is what allowed them to grow til 1B users, with a minimum staff. Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Absolutely. A relatively small, highly efficient team that invests in their knowledge, skill and processes is the cause of correct technology choices and not the other way around.
- bjarneh 5y ago
  > Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion. I think you are correct. It also works as some sort of advertisement. Others feel like they made the right tech choices, if they choose the same tech as WhatsApp or Spotify. Completely forgetting that they probably need to be somewhat proficient in Erlang to get the benefits from the language etc. I guess that "hire extremely good developers" is less sexy than just choose Rust/Erlang etc...
  - emerongi 5y ago
    Language choice does act as a filter, though. If you choose Erlang, do you get smarter developers by default?
    - bjarneh 5y ago
      From my experience it's always a good idea to choose a language that people would have to learn by themselves, i.e. none of the school languages (Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Javascript etc). In that way you only attract people who do sit down and learn new languages by themselves in their spare time, which filters out people with less interest in programming at least.
LewisVerstappen 5y ago
Hey, Author of the article here. Totally agreed. Apologies for that! The article isn't really "an article" but it's an email newsletter I send out. I'm quite surprised to see it on the frontpage of HN lol. So what you're reading is one of my emails. It's meant to be more of a summary with additional links to sources where people can read more if they're interested (emailing people long-form articles doesn't work well as a content format from what I've seen - even ignoring the length limit that email has). I'll add in some more links for additional reading (like the high scalability post) to give some more detail for people interested. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
- bjarneh 5y ago
  OK, I guess any post on this site is dissected a bit too much - looking for insight that was sometimes never even meant to be there. It is usually a good thing, as we expect anything making it to the front page of HN to contain some profound knowledge. Sometimes a popular title referring to an interesting topic can gain a lot of up-votes as well, and then the criticism can be harsh :-)

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The article is honestly kinda low on details, depth or new insights, but at least it links to some sources.

willejs 5y ago

Theres a high scalability post from years ago that has a bit more information. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

bjarneh 5y ago
Thanks, it does seem like choosing a language that was made for doing things in parallel to begin with was a good idea. To be honest, I've always felt that programming in functional languages creates less bugs, but perhaps that's just my imagination.
- dunefox 5y ago
  It certainly creates fewer bugs of a specific nature, depending on the language.
vadfa 5y ago
>19B messages in & 40B out per day whatsapp being a closed system I don't understand how this disparity is possible.
- the_other 5y ago
  Most people are in group chats.
aledthemathguy 5y ago
this is great. wondering if Telegram also have a post similar to this? (unlike whatsapp, they do store the messages)

Closi 5y ago

> The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either. It's something I think we have all seen a lot of times - that by the time a company is serving 1 billion users it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely, and because of that additional abstraction is required and the complexity/LOC skyrockets.

bjarneh 5y ago
> it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely But makes little sense (as a developer/engineer myself) to think that growth in users, requires a ton of new developers/engineers. We are not tattoo artists, our job can scale indefinitely if set up properly, i.e. all you should need to scale further (to 1BN or 7BN) should be enough money to buy more hardware; which WhatsApp/Facebook clearly has.
- Closi 5y ago
  I think that makes sense if the application doesn’t need to also grow much functionally during the expansion, but I believe the more common pattern is more users = more functionality to manage those users, support teams, global legal compliance and accommodate more niche phone systems = more engineers.
- macintux 5y ago
  You're assuming that their use case & technology stack & application scale cleanly horizontally and they're not spending all their time fighting fires. True in this instance, but far from a universal truth.
mnsc 5y ago
"this team of 7 engineers is responsible for formatting the text content of a chat, including alignment and sizes of emojis and gifs" "this team of 4 engineers is responsible for formatting the date of a message" "this team of 7 engineers is responsible for the overall formatting of a chat" "this team of 5 engineers is responsible for the formatting of the non-chat pars of the application, settings, profile page" "this team of 4 ux persons is responsible for aligning the non-technical parts of formatting and the user experience over all parts of the application" "this crossfunctional team of 5 is responsible for creating a framework to let the configuration of formatting be disconnected from the actual implementation of the formatting" "this team of 7 QA engineers will aid in manual verification of changes and bugfixes but will also automate test cases for formatting in the entire application" "this supporting team of 4 will develop automation tools and enable the formatting teams to collaborate in a high speed agile context"

mrweasel 5y ago

The technology stack isn't even that relevant. There have been a few different articles about WhatsApp and their 1B users with only 50 engineers. The key in previous articles was that WhatsApp hired really smart people. Having extremely talented engineers and a rather small scope is what allowed them to grow til 1B users, with a minimum staff. Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion.

dgb23 5y ago
Absolutely. A relatively small, highly efficient team that invests in their knowledge, skill and processes is the cause of correct technology choices and not the other way around.
bjarneh 5y ago
> Yet people seem to focus on the technology, because that's more easily replicated, and easier to accept, in my opinion. I think you are correct. It also works as some sort of advertisement. Others feel like they made the right tech choices, if they choose the same tech as WhatsApp or Spotify. Completely forgetting that they probably need to be somewhat proficient in Erlang to get the benefits from the language etc. I guess that "hire extremely good developers" is less sexy than just choose Rust/Erlang etc...
- emerongi 5y ago
  Language choice does act as a filter, though. If you choose Erlang, do you get smarter developers by default?
  - bjarneh 5y ago
    From my experience it's always a good idea to choose a language that people would have to learn by themselves, i.e. none of the school languages (Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Javascript etc). In that way you only attract people who do sit down and learn new languages by themselves in their spare time, which filters out people with less interest in programming at least.

LewisVerstappen 5y ago

Hey, Author of the article here. Totally agreed. Apologies for that! The article isn't really "an article" but it's an email newsletter I send out. I'm quite surprised to see it on the frontpage of HN lol. So what you're reading is one of my emails. It's meant to be more of a summary with additional links to sources where people can read more if they're interested (emailing people long-form articles doesn't work well as a content format from what I've seen - even ignoring the length limit that email has). I'll add in some more links for additional reading (like the high scalability post) to give some more detail for people interested. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

bjarneh 5y ago
OK, I guess any post on this site is dissected a bit too much - looking for insight that was sometimes never even meant to be there. It is usually a good thing, as we expect anything making it to the front page of HN to contain some profound knowledge. Sometimes a popular title referring to an interesting topic can gain a lot of up-votes as well, and then the criticism can be harsh :-)