121–130 of 265 posts
Cellular architecture? They've just rediscovered the art of redundancy systems
It's a blunt tool, much like PHP. PHP does seem to be a good choice for them, but I wouldn't want to work there. It's all right, there are different ways to do stuff.
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They decided to use every routing tool available at least once in their setup, so they can't do this. But there is no explanation in the blog about why they use so many platforms and so many routing tools. Sounds to me like they got themselves into a mess and decided to continue on that path.
Somewhere, an engineering “leader” is going to point to this blog post and then say, “Well, that’s how Slack did it!” and promptly copy this overwrought system
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Half the complaints on here on architecture posts are 'you don't need this kind of stuff unless you're at FAANG scale'. Now we have a write up of something that's accessible to businesses at non-FAAANG scale, and we have the new complaint, that this kind of stuff isn't worthy of FAANG-scale architecture.
Geo traffic distribution, multi regions/AZs with functionality to weight and drain traffic should be used in most SaaS services where a simple failure somewhere could cost users time and lose company money/goodwill. It's not terribly hard nor expensive.
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It sounds like you didn’t have persistent data, and were only offering compute? If there’s no need for a coherent master view accessible/writeable from all the clusters, there would be no reason to use multi-region cluster whatsoever.
We did. But the persisted data didn't live inside those ephemeral compute clusters though.
Clearly define boundaries and acceptable behavior within boundaries.
Setup up telemetry and observability to monitor for threshold violations.
Simple. Right?
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The other bit is separating the service into isolated cells so issues in one don't affect dependent services everywhere like they had experienced before. But yeah any good SRE could point this out years ago.
Just odd a company worth billions and billions of dollars is just now discovering HA models standard since the 90s. Can expand the Clos network architecture to these distributed service applications too. But judging by Slack's client quality, mature concepts such as those must be new to them.
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That’s a simple question that’s hard to answer. A slightly different question that’s a bit easier to answer: “if I could wave a magic wand and X million lines of code were instantly rewritten and all developers were instantly trained on that language”. There the choice would be limited to languages that have similar or faster perf characteristics to Hack, without sacrificing developer productivity. Rust is out of the…
I like your question way better than mine :) Some follow-up … A. isn’t PHP on par perf wise to Hack these days? Re: “PHP is too slow” comment. B. have you ever looked into PHP-NGX? It’s perf looks impressive, though you lose the benefit of stateless https://github.com/rryqszq4/ngx-php https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21
No. But I don't have any numbers, because it's been years since the two languages were directly comparable on anything but a teeny tiny example program.
Facebook gets big cost savings from a 1% improvement in performance, so they make sure that performance is as good as it can possibly be. They have a team of engineers working on the problem.
PHP doesn't have any engineers working on performance full-time — it's impossible for the language to compete there. Hack has also removed a bunch of PHP constructs (e.g. magic methods) that are a drain on performance, so there's no way to close the gap.
But that should in no way make you choose Hack over PHP. Apart from anything else, the delta won't matter for 99.9% of websites.
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The only way you get Hack on that list of languages is that they had a policy of letting lead engineers starting a project to choose the language at will, and they hired enough lead engineers who previously worked at FB/Meta.
I think that Hack might’ve been on that list earlier than you think. Slack started as a PHP application.
"cellular architecture" What? Does amazon need to push for new sales points or are they simply making up architectures now?
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/5/9/cell-architectures....