This week’s The Economist features a special report on social networking. It is a very engaging read and also very informative. Link to the article can be found here Global Swap Shops
What got me interested were the comments on the need for a scalable design. In almost every project that I have worked on, one of the key determinants that has dominated the choice of one technology package over another has been Scalability. In hardware and telecommunications space scalability is defined as a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged.(Source -Wikipedia). Thus be it an E-Commerce website or an Order Management platform, the anticipated volume is a question that haunts almost every Solutions Architect. Given how important performance and scalability are for projects that have an average of one million plus users, one can only imagine how a company like Facebook manages its volume forecasting and computing power needs
Network Effect - Source The Economist
As the article states, “Most web businesses can add servers and databases in a fairly linear fashion as they acquire more users, but social networks find it almost impossible to gauge exactly how much computing power they will need because of the network effect.” Network Effect is another term used here that needs some explanation. In the social networking context, network effect is defined as the value of a network to its users rises exponentially with the number of people connected to it. In other words, the network yields maximum benefit when more and more users join the bandwagon.
I am curious to find out about Facebook’s load balancing and user traffic forecasting techniques that allows them to cater to the growing demands. Any good sources for this information ?
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