Category: Technology

The Problem Any multitenant service with public REST APIs needs to be able to protect itself from excessive usage by one or more tenants. Additionally, as the number of instances that support these services is dynamic and varies based on load, the need arrises to perform coordinated rate limiting on a per tenant, per endpoint basis.… Continue reading Coordinated Rate Limiting in Microservices

Whether it’s iterating on Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm or delivering the most relevant ads to users, we are constantly exploring new features to help improve our machine learning (ML) models. Every time we add new features, we create a challenging data engineering problem that requires us to think strategically about the choices we make.… Continue reading A linear programming approach for optimizing features in ML models

ListenSubscribe In this episode, Ian, Laura, and Wesley talk about the importance of communication skills, specifically writing, for people in technical roles. Ian calls writing the single most important meta skill you can have. And the good news is that you can get better at it, with deliberate practice! Ian and Wesley both come from… Continue reading 118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers

We are releasing Winterfell, our implementation of a STARK prover/verifier to Crates.io  Winterfell is an easy to use open source implementation of STARKs for security and privacy applications. One potential application for Winterfell’s zero-knowledge proofs is blockchain privacy and scalability.  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” —Clarke’s Third Law What if the average… Continue reading Open sourcing Winterfell: A STARK prover and verifier

ZippyDB is the largest strongly consistent, geographically distributed key-value store at Facebook. Since we first deployed ZippyDB in 2012, this key-value store has expanded rapidly, and today, ZippyDB serves a number of use cases, ranging from metadata for a distributed filesystem, counting events for both internal and external purposes, to product data that’s used for… Continue reading How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB

What the research is:  A first-of-its-kind study detailing our backbone management strategy to ensure high service performance throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic moved most social interactions online and caused an unprecedented stress test on our global network infrastructure with tens of data center regions. At this scale, failures such as fiber cuts, router misconfigurations,… Continue reading Risk-driven backbone management during COVID-19 and beyond

Sales representatives deal with hundreds of emails everyday. To help them prioritize, Salesforce offers critical insights on emails received. These insights are either generated by our deep learning models or defined by the customer by matching keywords using regex expressions. Insights are generated in real time in our microservice architecture, which is built using Kafka… Continue reading Real-time Einstein Insights Using Kafka Streams

Facebook engineers have built and open-sourced an Open Compute Time Appliance, an important component of the modern timing infrastructure. To make this possible, we came up with the Time Card — a PCI Express (PCIe) card that can turn almost any commodity server into a time appliance. With the help of the OCP community, we… Continue reading Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance