Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's vice president of engineering
At the Facebook’s F8 developer conference, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the company would have a billion likes by end of the day. That is a big number that would make anyone think twice about the load it might put on their web infrastructure. Not Facebook – or at least that is what Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering and Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of tech operations told me when I ran into them earlier today. Both of them were looking awfully relaxed for guys who were in charge of an infrastructure being put to stress test.
“We do a lot more traffic every day than the load a billion likes” might generate,” Schroepfer remarked. It is clear that Facebook has learnt from Google that infrastructure is a vital and a strategic advantage. No wonder they are building their own data centers. I think that is one of the reasons they allow their chief to set audacious goals such as the “entire web is going to be social.” Otherwise Facebook can become the single point of failure for this social web.
