dhikchik ("dhik chik!")

I'm not going to follow this one!

Hulu LLC is in talks with CBS Corp., Viacom Inc. and Time Warner Inc. to add their television shows to the video website’s planned paid subscription service, people with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

CBS, the only one of the four major U.S. broadcast networks without an ownership stake in Hulu, may begin providing programs after the TV season starts in September, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.

Facebook’s scaling challenge

Before we get into the details, here are a few factoids to give you an idea of the scaling challenge that Facebook has to deal with:

• Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner).
• There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
• Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN.
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
• Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)

Software that helps Facebook scale

In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.

For example:

• Facebook still uses PHP, but it has built a compiler for it so it can be turned into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance.
• Facebook uses Linux, but has optimized it for its own purposes (especially in terms of network throughput).
• Facebook uses MySQL, but primarily as a key-value persistent storage, moving joins and logic onto the web servers since optimizations are easier to perform there (on the “other side” of the Memcached layer).

Then there are the custom-written systems, like Haystack, a highly scalable object store used to serve Facebook’s immense amount of photos, or Scribe, a logging system that can operate at the scale of Facebook (which is far from trivial).

Read more to find out about Memcached, HipHop, Haystack, BigPipe, Cassandra, Scribe, Hadoop, Thrift, Varnish and more!

On a side note, I can still code!

Engineering Rules! - Google has always been driven by outstanding engineering talent. Google hires only the best engineers. The legends of complex interview questions and coding problems are true. Educational achievement is valued at Google. Engineers are at every level, starting at the top, in all kinds of positions at Google. Nearly all the top management at Google have engineering backgrounds. Marketing, sales, business development, product management, are all more likely to be former engineers. The engineering background brings a rigorous thought process that questions assumptions and requires accurate data in the decision process. That doesn't mean every decision will be perfect, but it will be based on data...not opinions.

Always believe in data not opinions!