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Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

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Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#3
Quite an interesting talk. I liked the format: "How to get more rps?..."

It's humbling to think of the scale that some other folks deal with. I'm concerned of 2x growth with running a couple thousand sites on a dozen servers.

You can't just hit up SO when you run into a problem at Facebook's scale.

Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#4
In 2001 when I was 14, I had no idea what scalability was or how anyone scaled websites. I ran a site with 20k users on a single sever with a single Pentium IV (1.4? Ghz) processor from a garage with no climate control and the fastest cable connection I could afford. At peak hours the processor finally succumbed to the load and I had to buy a second server. I was able to talk a local ISP into co-locating the servers in their rack (Climate control! Fiber!). When I realized that I could load balance with DNS and no load balancing software, I thought I was a genius. The king of scalability.

Needless to say, I was not the king. The engineers at Facebook are king.

Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#6
post #5

Can anybody summarize the talk for folks like me who for several reasons cannot watch the video?

I'd like to complement this comment and suggest that this practice should be applied to links that may be blocked to a grand part of us, people that are behind a firewall.

Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#7
post #2

Surprised they use tinydns.

Why would I get downvoted for that? It's a serious concern. It's missing modern and often important features unless you use unofficial patchsets, and some missing entirely (NSEC3). And then there are all the forks like dbndns from Debian, N-DJBDNS, etc...

Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#9
post #7
post #2

Surprised they use tinydns.

Why would I get downvoted for that? It's a serious concern. It's missing modern and often important features unless you use unofficial patchsets, and some missing entirely (NSEC3). And then there are all the forks like dbndns from Debian, N-DJBDNS, etc...

Specifically, what's bad about tinydns? Compared to BIND, it's a veritable Fort Knox of security.

DNSSEC isn't a requirement for most people, and I'd wager a lot of people consider DNSSEC more harmful than beneficial.

Re: Building a Billion User Load Balancer [video]

#10
post #2

Surprised they use tinydns.

You'd be even more surprised what they used before tinydns. :D They wanted speed and robustness, and iterated over quite a few choices including roll-yer-own.

Source: I created a pilot project called "Doppler" that was eventually folded into this system. http://carlos.bueno.org/2011/07/doppler.html

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