What Facebook's Memcache Taught Me About Systems Thinking
8 hours ago
- #scalability
- #caching
- #systems-thinking
- Facebook's Memcache design emphasizes keeping the core dumb and pushing complexity outward to clients for easier management and scalability.
- Systems thinking at Facebook focuses on survival at scale, using pragmatic solutions like UDP for GET requests and leases to prevent thundering herds.
- Consistency is treated as a tunable parameter, allowing for controlled inconsistency to improve performance and user experience.
- Caching is optimized for economics by segregating memory pools based on access patterns and cost of misses.
- Failure is expected and designed for, with solutions like Gutter pools to absorb shock and prevent cascade failures.
- Performance tuning addresses tail latencies and predictability, not just average speeds, to improve user experience.
- Systems thinking is essential for building resilient infrastructure, focusing on trade-offs and graceful degradation under pressure.