Facebook Scaling Out across Data Centers

Jason Sobel has an interesting post on scaling out of Facebook on to a new data center in the East Coast at Virginia. A really interesting insight into some of the design decisions that have given us one of the most trafficked sites on the face of the planet today.

Here are two points that struck me on reading the post ..

• Changing the sql grammar in the replication stream to incorporate eviction of expired items from memcached looks like a hack. A more traditional implementation could have been using triggers or MySQL UDFs to atomicize the entire transaction. But generic solutions always come ironclad with some performance overhead. It's no wonder that Facebook needs to do all specializations, even if that amounts to no ceremony and all hack.


• Just wondering that Facebook still writes in one data center. With all the CAP theorem and eventual consistency stuff being solved by Amazon, why does Facebook still have this limitation ?