

FB's New Real-time Messaging System: HBase to Store 135+B Messages a Month - kapilkaisare
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/11/16/facebooks-new-real-time-messaging-system-hbase-to-store-135.html

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blhack
Maybe it's just me being naive, but facebook has got to be one of the most
awesome places that there is to work.

I swear that every couple of months I hear about a situation that basically
comes down to this:

Boss: "Hello, Ryan, we would like to do $impossible_thing""

Ryan: "Huh, that sounds kindof impossible. But I guess we could get a team of
the smartest people in our industry together and build an entirely new suite
of tools to make $impossible_thing into $totally_normal_thing..."

Boss: "Yeah, do it!"

6 months later

Ryan and boss (to internet): "Hey, guys, check out this thing we made. Here,
you can have it for free. Have a nice day!"

~~~
jpeterson
_Huh, that sounds kindof impossible. But I guess we could get a team of the
smartest people in our industry together and build an entirely new suite of
tools to make $impossible_thing into $totally_normal_thing..._

HBase has been around for a while, and is part of the Apache Hadoop project.
You don't need Zuckerberg signing your checks to work on cool projects along
with really smart people.

~~~
blhack
I'm also talking about cassandra.

Out of curiosity, am I wrong about this? Cassandra was developed by facebook,
wasn't it?

(I was asking because this was downvoted. I thought maybe I was mistaken about
cassandra)

~~~
ahi
Yes, it was.

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ddlatham
It's very interesting that they didn't have the need to compromise on
consistency and went with a fully consistent system, HBase.

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schumihan
I suppose fb caches the recent messages in memory, and use HBASE as archive
storage most of the time.

It depends on the developer's favor to pick up a system. If it's me, I will
pickup cassandra. The consistency model is not so hard to work with.

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physcab
heh. I attended Jonathan Gray's talk at Hadoop World this year (which was
pretty good!) and he talked a lot about Facebook's infrastructure. Gray has
been a primary committer on the HBase project for a while (since inception?)
and I remember people somewhat teasing that HBase was kind of the pet project
of the NoSQL world. I've had fun hacking on it off and on myself. Gray
amusingly said that HBase was being prepped for production in a huge way, but
he couldn't give any details.

Well, I guess we know now! Definitely looking forward to all the future
developments of HBase. There are a lot of interesting contribs being made.

