Meta’s Microservice Architecture
Darby Huye et al. (PDF, via Hacker News):
We present a top-down analysis of Meta’s microservice architecture, starting from its service-level topology and descending into individual request workflows. (Request workflows describe the order and timing of services visited by requests when executing.) Our focus is on underreported characteristics of microservice architectures important for developing microservice tools and artificially modeling microservice topologies. Specifically, we describe growth and churn of the microservice topology (to inform tools that learn models of the topology), whether elements of the topology fit power-law distributions common to large graphs (to inform potential artificial topology generators), and the predictability of individual request workflows (to inform the vast number of tools that work by aggregating trace data).
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A basic assumption of Meta’s architecture (which may or may not be true for other organizations’ architectures) is that business use case is a sufficient partitioning by which to define services, scale functionality, and observe behaviors.
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Scale is measured in millions of instances: On 2022/12/21, the microservice topology contained 18,500 active services and over 12 million service instances.
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We investigated the services that have the highest fan-in and fan-out degrees. The former is a vault server storing credentials for use by other services. The latter is a service for querying hosts for arbitrary statistics.
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Services can be written in many programming languages. There are currently 16 different programming languages in use at Meta, with the most popular being Hack (a version of PHP), measured by lines of code. Other popular languages include: C++, Python, and Java, with the rest forming a long tail.
Previously:
- How the Threads App Was Built
- Scaling Up the Prime Video Audio/Video Monitoring
- The Evolution of Facebook’s iOS App Architecture
- Entropy of Big Distributed Systems
- The Facebook App’s 18,000 Classes
- Facebook’s iOS Infrastructure
- Facebook Makes Mercurial Faster Than Git
- Introducing the Hack Programming Language
- Git at Facebook Scale
