Tuenti: A Silicon Valley-like startup... in Spain :) [2011]

This talk is a brief presentation of what is Tuenti, from the company history and structure to some fun-facts about how big we are and how much Spanish youth is using us to live their online social experience. At the end, I focus on the Backend Engineering in Tuenti and explain some general scalability aspects about how to build and evolve a web-app to sustain rapid growth.

Tuenti is the leading spanish invitation-only private social networking website that has been referred to as the "Spanish Facebook". According to ComScore, it is the most trafficked website in the country, having more monthly page views in Spain than Facebook and Google combined.

The site has rapidly grown in four years with millions of active daily users and was one of the most searched terms in Google's 2008 and 2009 Zeitgeists. We currently have more than 25 billion monthly page views and we are processing, storing and serving more than 2.5 million new photos every day (with peaks up to 5 million), with over 6 Gbps of image traffic at peak.

Transcript

1. A Silicon Valley-like startup... in Spain :)
   J. Javier Maestro – jjmaestro@tuenti.com
   Backend Engineer – Core & Scalability Team
   

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2. Tuenti is...
   

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9. Now, seriously...
   * the TV, Rockband and Paintball team building are real, though! :)
   

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13. Today
    

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18. +200 employees
    65% engineers
    18 nationalities
    

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19. Back to the
    Future?
    

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21. Tuenti Facts
    

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22. BIG Numbers
    +10 million users
    +150 million daily chat messages
    +4 million daily uploaded photos
    

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23. BIG Numbers
    +30 billion monthly page views
    +27k web requests/second
    +12Gbps peaks (including CDNs)
    +4Gbps just the datacenter
    +1000 servers
    

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24. BIG Numbers
    50% of users on site daily, averaging
    3 sessions per day
    82 minutes per day
    20% of users use mobile features
    daily
    

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25. La palabra más buscada en Google España
    (Google Zeitgeist 2009 y 2010 YTD)
    

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29. “The Spanish friendship map” by Barcelona Media
    

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31. Viral
    

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37. Tech Teams
    

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38. Frontend
    

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40. Mobile
    

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42. Architecture
    

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44. Dev Tools
    

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46. Testing
    Framework
    

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48. QA
    Quality Assurance
    

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50. Systems
    

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52. IT (crowd :)
    

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54. Design & UX
    

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56. Backend
    

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58. +much more!
    User Support
    Sales, Marketing
    Law, Finance
    Office Staff
    Cleaning Staff
    

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59. Magic stuff...
    

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60. In the beginning…
    One or few servers for the
    entire application
    Monolithic structure
    Bottleneck: Database reads
    

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61. Cache
    Switch out heavy DB reads
    for light cache reads
    Significant reduction in DB
    load
    Typical page load has
    under 2 or 3 queries, and
    up to hundreds of cache
    reads
    Bottleneck remains the
    same as before
    

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62. Replication
    Master / Slave
    architecture
    Split up reads and
    writes
    Optimized
    configurations
    Bottleneck: dataset
    size
    

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63. Data Separation
    Divide your schema into
    logical blocks
    One cluster per data type
    More complicated to
    manage in code.
    Bottleneck: Overload on a
    given data type
    

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64. Data Partitioning
    Divide a single table into
    parts and spread them
    over several clusters
    Almost limitless
    scalability
    Not free – Code
    complexity increases
    significantly
    Bottleneck: dataset size
    (again)
    

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65. Cache Partitioning
    Partitioning does not
    need to be limited to
    databases
    Partitioned
    Memcached and
    frontend farms
    Improves internal
    network usage
    Cross partitioning
    scheme between
    cache and database
    

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66. Archiving
    Storing less-frequently-
    used data in alternative
    storage
    Keeps main table size
    within known limits
    Flexibility when
    choosing alternative
    storage
    

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67. Client-side routing
    Use browser logic to load balance over
    frontend farms
    Reduce server load
    Remove a potential SPOF
    

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68. Content Delivery Networks
    Static content
    Optimized for massive scaling
    Everything has a price – choose your
    optimizations wisely
    

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69. Join us!
    http://jobs.tuenti.com
    

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70. Internships
    Thesis
    Associate Engineer
    Engineer
    Senior Engineer
    

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71. Thank you!
    jjmaestro@tuenti.com
    talent@tuenti.com
    

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