Asynchronous computing at Meta: Overview and learnings

We’ve made architecture changes to Meta’s event driven asynchronous computing platform that have  enabled easy integration with multiple event-sources.  We’re sharing our learnings from handling various workloads and how to tackle trade offs made with certain design choices in building the platform. Asynchronous computing is a paradigm where the...

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Watch Meta’s engineers discuss optimizing large-scale networks

Managing network solutions amidst a growing scale inherently brings challenges around performance, deployment, and operational complexities.  At Meta, we’ve found that these challenges broadly fall into three themes: 1.)   Data center networking: Over the past decade, on the physical front, we have seen a rise in vendor-specific hardware that comes...

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Tulip: Modernizing Meta’s data platform

The technical journey discusses the motivations, challenges, and technical solutions employed for warehouse schematization, especially a change to the wire serialization format employed in Meta’s data platform for data interchange related to Warehouse Analytics Logging. Here, we discuss the engineering, scaling, and nontechnical challenges of modernizing ...

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Open-sourcing Anonymous Credential Service

Meta has open-sourced Anonymous Credential Service (ACS), a highly available multitenant service that allows clients to authenticate in a de-identified manner. ACS enhances privacy and security while also being compute-conscious. By open-sourcing and fostering a community for ACS, we believe we can accelerate the pace of innovation in de-identified...

Dec 2022

Enabling static analysis of SQL queries at Meta

UPM is our internal standalone library to perform static analysis of SQL code and enhance SQL authoring.  UPM takes SQL code as input and represents it as a data structure called a semantic tree. Infrastructure teams at Meta leverage UPM to build SQL linters, catch user mistakes in SQL code, and perform data lineage analysis at scale. Executing...

Nov 2022

Retrofitting null-safety onto Java at Meta

We developed a new static analysis tool called Nullsafe that is used at Meta to detect NullPointerException (NPE) errors in Java code. Interoperability with legacy code and gradual deployment model were key to Nullsafe’s wide adoption and allowed us to recover some null-safety properties in the context of an otherwise null-unsafe language in a multimillion-line...

Nov 2022

PTP: Timing accuracy and precision for the future of computing

Meta is deploying a timing protocol, Precision Time Protocol (PTP), that will offer new levels of accuracy and precision to our networks and data centers. We believe PTP will become the global standard for keeping time in computer networks. PTP will benefit today’s products and services and will be a foundational technology behind the development...

Nov 2022

How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

Implementing Precision Time Protocol (PTP) at Meta allows us to synchronize the systems that drive our products and services down to nanosecond precision. PTP’s predecessor, Network Time Protocol (NTP), provided us with millisecond precision, but as we scale to more advanced systems on our way to building the next computing platform, the metaverse and...

Nov 2022

Move faster, wait less: Improving code review time at Meta

Code reviews are one of the most important parts of the software development process At Meta we’ve recognized the need to make code reviews as fast as possible without sacrificing quality We’re sharing several tools and steps we’ve taken at Meta to reduce the time waiting for code reviews When done well, code reviews can catch bugs, teach best...

Nov 2022

Sapling: Source control that’s user-friendly and scalable

Sapling is a new Git-compatible source control client. Sapling emphasizes usability while also scaling to the largest repositories in the world. ReviewStack is a demonstration code review UI for GitHub pull requests that integrates with Sapling to make reviewing stacks of commits easy. You can get started using Sapling today.  Source control is...

Nov 2022