Erlang Factory 2014 - That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp

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kornish · 2020-09 · Strong recommendation

One of my favorite talks is by Rick Reed about scaling Erlang at WhatsApp. What an absolute savage. He flies through an articulate and in-depth curriculum on system performance and bottleneck mitigation. The talk is called "That's 'Billion' with a 'B'" and makes for a great lunchtime watch: [VIDEO]

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kornish · 2017-07 · Strong recommendation

Not sure why this comment saw a couple downvotes earlier. mbesto is correct: for most startups, most of the time, competitive advantage doesn't come from the underlying tech stack. To make a general statement, most things could be done similarly on any of several platforms. However, when product requirements match exceptionally well with a specialized technology, you can see things that would simply be infeasible or extremely tough using a different stack. WhatsApp + Erlang was one of those cases (watch this talk and imagine trying to recreate that system with only a handful of server engineers using any other tech: [VIDEO] ). Discord + Elixir appears to be another. Curious if anyone has any examples that spring to mind from outside the highly concurrent messaging space.

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rdtsc · 2014-07 · Strong recommendation

My other favorite "scalability" study is from WhatsApp: [VIDEO] That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp (that walk title was create before the acquisition and was mean to imply message count, after the acquisition it got a secondary meaning). The one thing that is fascinating about it, is how small their team was compared to the volume and complexity of the operation.

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