Facebook: We need to create our own dev and management tools

With nearly 1 billion users worldwide and 500 million people visiting its social network every day, Facebook has its work cut out for it in managing its systems. To help do that, the company has been developing its own management and development tools tuned to its specific needs, rather than relying on commercial offerings.

Tools in use include Perflab, for testing site changes committed by engineers; Gatekeeper, for advanced A/B testing of code changes; and Claspin, providing a high-density heat map for viewing a large set of servers. "We spent a lot of time building up the internal tool stack," said Jay Parikh, Facebook vice president of infrastructure engineering, at the O'Reilly Velocity conference Tuesday in Santa Clara, Calif. The conference is focused on Web performance and operations, with Facebook serving as a prime example of the demands being made on the Web. Read more...