With 2.98 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the third-busiest website on the internet and has built an extensive infrastructure to support its massive user base. Since it launched its first company-built and -operated server farm in Prineville, Oregon, in April 2011, the social media platform has not stopped building new data centers and seeking new data center sites. Facebook's data centers house tens of thousands of computer servers -- networked together and linked to the outside world through fiber optic cables.
Halloween has become the Super Bowl for online photo storage, and one of the busiest days of the year for Facebook, which sees daily spikes of more than double its normal photo uploads.
Halloween has become the Super Bowl for online photo storage, and one of the busiest days of the year for Facebook, which sees daily spikes of more than double its normal photo uploads.
Facebook now has about 30,000 servers supporting its operations, hosts 80 billion photos, and serves up more than 600,000 photos to its users every second.
Engineers from Facebook and Google made the case for faster Ethernet networks - definitely 100-Gigabit Ethernet, and perhaps even Terabit Ethernet - at an Ethernet Alliance seminar last week.
Facebook has made a major commitment to its future infrastructure, locking down a large chunk of data center in northern Virginia that will provide space for thousands of additional servers from 2011 forward.
The recent launch of Facebook usernames was a "unique in its potential for trouble" and led the social network to prepare "nuclear options" involving turning off popular features to keep the site online.
The recent launch of Facebook usernames was a "unique in its potential for trouble" and led the social network to prepare "nuclear options" involving turning off popular features to keep the site online.
Facebook has managed epic growth by cultivating a culture of collaboration between engineering and operations, two groups that often are in conflict, according to VP of technical operations Jonathan Heiliger.