Write a 2 – 3 page paper describing the hardware and software architecture required for a social networking site
As internet technology and innovation advances significantly each year, this has allowed individuals and companies to benefit from advanced interactive platform. Groups and individuals easy access to adequate communication with other businesses globally through effective social media platforms. This has been made possible through interractive use of advanced software and hardware architecture that are adequately effective in social networking.
Facebook utilises a monolithic approach in its application development.The social meddia giant handles data in gigantic quantities from billions of users worldwide.This requires constant real time monitoring of perfomance variation by the company technicians.Facebook web serers directly access MySql to edit social graphs.Storage by Tao data storage utilises direct graph abstraction and is subject to the object association model utilising MySql for sustained storage while mediating database access.
Facebook’s copious amounts of Binary Large OBjects(BLOBs) demands prompt accessibility and reliable storage.By identifying and isolating ‘ hot’ frequently accessed BLOBs and ‘warm’ less frequently accessed regions,Storage efficacy measured in effective replication BLOB factor is increased.Facebook software is split into Haystack which handles ‘hot’ BLOBs and F4 which handles ‘warm’ BLOBs.F4 has been introduced recently for its ability to utilise erasure coding with stripping and parity blocks to provide efficient and hardy warm storage.
All of this software systems and data require hardware on which to input process and store the data.Facebook currently has an estimated 60,000 servers,their Hive and Hadoop cluster with 96 TB RAM,3000 servers and 24 core 32 GB RAM.Facebook has taken into consideration flexibility , scalability and cost efficiency in choosing their hardware architecture.Facebook utilises HBase derived combination platform for data storage in distributed servers.The tailing architecture system stores data in log files then tails them.Log file data is read by Ptail.
References.
Gehl, R. W. (2012). Real (Software) AbstractionsOn the Rise of Facebook and the Fall of MySpace. Social Text, 30(2 (111)), 99-119.