Overview of Facebook scalable architecture

Scalability is essential for web applications with massive numbers of users. The high growth rates observed in web based systems having hundreds of thousands of users accessing it continuously led to major response time problems for users who are trying to receive information at the same time. As more and more users access a web site, one needs to know how the performance varies. The main challenge Facebook engineer's face, despite receiving billions of users on a daily basis, is keeping the website online and functional. The current architecture of Facebook is very large and consists of many technologies and thousands of servers. In this paper Facebook's architecture and how it handles scalability issues is going to be described, helping to have a better understanding of how Facebook actually works.