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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

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Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#51

Post by paraknight »

nodejs_rulez_1 wrote: post #29
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

> ...As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a nightmare later. But the sort of people choosing a JS stack are quite quick to move on. Make a mess, slap a new achievement on CV and dash.

I don't agree, but I also find your username ironic. Did you dash?

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#52

Post by d3nj4l »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #15
bradhe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook Messenger, if I remember correctly, was also originally authored in Erlang.

Discord also if I remember correctly?

Discord was written in Elixir! https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#53

Post by lampe3 »

Traster wrote: post #45

I think one thing to consider is that WhatsApp is probably by nature a scalable application. It is in the end, simply a client app that sends data to other client apps. So by nature, you scale in parallel very well, there are no 1-all communications. So unlike something like facebook where the data all needs to go to a central server and be polled by an unknown (but potentially arbitrary large) number of clients, in…

I fully agree here.

Sending messages to a known (small) number of people is a solved problem for a long time. Email for example.

With WhatsApp, it is even easier than email because WhatsApp is a closed system, and you can optimize.

They used an uncommon setup? Okay cool. How does this help me? or any other company?

I'm not sure what I should learn from this story?

The only thing is: Feature creep is bad.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#54

Post by freeall »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

Do we really think Javascript is exotic? Hasn't it proved itself over many years now?

That doesn't mean it can't have issues like anything else. And because of the massive scale of the language you'll see a lot of shit. It's a language and ecosystem like anything else - it's what you do with it that matters.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#55

Post by true_religion »

seanhandley wrote: post #24
a_humean wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about its original purpose, which was telecoms infrastructure?

Oh, absolutely. I framed it this way intentionally. Without a doubt the most successful Erlang apps are telecoms related.

WhatsApp is basically modern SMS. That's sort of a telecom application.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#57

Post by M0r13n »

I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated.

For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers.

The output is noticeably larger. The number of new features and especially the stability is significantly better. It is noticeable that due to the small team, each project has one or two "heroes". They are responsible for most of the commits and know the system inside out.

These "heroes" have been working on the same or similar systems for over 30 years in some cases and have experienced a lot in their careers. As such, they can bring experience and advice that is just out of reach for others.

Given the choice, I would always prefer a small team over a large team.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#58

Post by peoplefromibiza »

polyomino wrote: post #7
seanhandley wrote: post #6

I wonder if WhatsApp could be considered the most successful user-facing application with an Erlang backend.

What other candidates are there?

while WhatsApp is the largest I am aware of (it's one of the leading platforms Worldwide anyway), there are quite a few, sometimes in the form of Elixir:

- Discord

- Pinterest

- Spotify

- Klarna

- Riot games (the messaging service)

- PepsiCo (for their billion making e-commerce)

- Toyota (for the connected platform)

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#59

Post by hasperdi »

tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

These issues that you described can happen with any language, ask any programmer or system engineer with long enough experience they’ll have stories with weird problems.

Regardless which language you pick, there will always be these kinds of issues.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#60

Post by [deleted] »

harpratap wrote: post #18
alanfranz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

You are very naively assuming it would actually reach 1B users if it was paid.

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