How Facebook Manages Its Data
With a massive user base of over a billion people, Facebook has sometimes (and quite humorously) been dubbed the biggest human database that ever existed in history. However, Facebook isn’t only a social network that stores data about users; it’s also a gigantic database that houses loads of ‘data about data’. Now before you get confused, let me quickly break it down to get a better perspective.
Last year alone, Facebook reportedly scanned approximately 210 terabytes of data every hour. This number has since then doubled. That’s millions of photos, billions of likes, and more billions of Facebook shares all managed and personalised to its users’ needs.
To put things into perspective, here’s a brief analysis of the amount of data which flows through Facebook’s data centers all day, everyday:
About 4.5 billion likes generated daily (as of May 2013) on and off of the Facebook website
300 million photo uploads
Over 70,000 queries executed
More than 2.5B – content items shared
500+ terabytes of new data “ingested”
You might just wonder how Facebook does all this in perfect harmony? I found a very fascinating short video describing how Facebook manages its data. Enjoy 🙂