Migrating Facebook to MySQL 8.0

MySQL, an open source database developed by Oracle, powers some of Facebook’s most important workloads. We actively develop new features in MySQL to support our evolving requirements. These features change many different areas of MySQL, including client connectors, storage engine, optimizer, and replication. Each new major version of MySQL requires...

3d

Fully Sharded Data Parallel: faster AI training with fewer GPUs

Training AI models at a large scale isn’t easy. Aside from the need for large amounts of computing power and resources, there is also considerable engineering complexity behind training very large models. At Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Engineering, we have been working on building tools and infrastructure to make training large AI models easier. Our...

2w

How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability

For years, people have been asking us to create a true multi-device experience that allows people to use WhatsApp on other devices without requiring a smartphone connection. Today, we’re announcing the rollout of a limited public beta test for WhatsApp’s updated multi-device capability.  With this new capability, you can now use WhatsApp on your phone...

2w

Enforcing encryption at scale

Our infrastructure supports thousands of services that handle billions of requests per second. We’ve previously discussed how we built our service encryption infrastructure to keep these globally distributed services operating securely and performantly. This post discusses the system we designed to enforce encryption policies within our network and...

2w

Ribbon filter: Practically smaller than Bloom and Xor

What the research is: The Ribbon filter is a new data structure that is more space-efficient than the popular Bloom filters that are widely used for optimizing data retrieval. One of the ways that Bloom, and now Ribbon, filters solve real engineering problems is by providing smooth configurability unmatched by other filters. Bloom filters work by...

3w

Asicmon: A platform agnostic observability system for AI accelerators

We will be hosting a talk about our work on, “A Platform Agnostic Observability System for AI Accelerators” during our virtual Systems @Scale event at 10:20 a.m. PT on Wednesday, June 30, followed by a live Q&A session. Please submit any questions to systemsatscale@fb.com before the event. Accelerators are special-purpose hardware devices optimized...

4w

Driving towards an open internet ecosystem to help tackle the digital divide

Connectivity is an integral part of Facebook’s mission to bring people closer together, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only heightened the demand for critical internet access. According to the latest edition of our Inclusive Internet Index, nearly 70 percent of people around the world believe that increased internet usage in all aspects of their lives...

4w

Consolidating Facebook storage infrastructure with Tectonic file system

What the research is:  Tectonic, our data center scale distributed file system, enables better resource utilization, promotes simpler services, and requires less operational complexity than our previous approach. Our previous storage infrastructure consisted of a set of use-case specific storage systems. Clusters, or instances of these storage systems,...

Jun 2021

Meet Kats — a one-stop shop for time series analysis

What it is:  A new library to analyze time series data. Kats is a lightweight, easy-to-use, and generalizable framework for generic time series analysis, including forecasting, anomaly detection, multivariate analysis, and feature extraction/embedding. To the best of our knowledge, Kats is the first comprehensive Python library for generic time series...

Jun 2021

Network hose: Managing uncertain network demand with model simplicity

Our production backbone network connects our data centers and delivers content to our users. The network supports a vast number of different services, distributed across a multitude of data centers. Traffic patterns shift over time from one data center to another due to the introduction of new services, service architecture changes, changes in user...

Jun 2021