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
2. Tuenti is...
9. Now, seriously... * the TV, Rockband and Paintball team building are real, though! :)
13. Today
18. +200 employees 65% engineers 18 nationalities
19. Back to the Future?
21. Tuenti Facts
22. BIG Numbers +10 million users +150 million daily chat messages +4 million daily uploaded photos
23. BIG Numbers +30 billion monthly page views +27k web requests/second +12Gbps peaks (including CDNs) +4Gbps just the datacenter +1000 servers
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
25. La palabra más buscada en Google España (Google Zeitgeist 2009 y 2010 YTD)
29. “The Spanish friendship map” by Barcelona Media
31. Viral
37. Tech Teams
38. Frontend
40. Mobile
42. Architecture
44. Dev Tools
46. Testing Framework
48. QA Quality Assurance
50. Systems
52. IT (crowd :)
54. Design & UX
56. Backend
58. +much more! User Support Sales, Marketing Law, Finance Office Staff Cleaning Staff
59. Magic stuff...
60. In the beginning… One or few servers for the entire application Monolithic structure Bottleneck: Database reads
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
62. Replication Master / Slave architecture Split up reads and writes Optimized configurations Bottleneck: dataset size
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
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)
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
66. Archiving Storing less-frequently- used data in alternative storage Keeps main table size within known limits Flexibility when choosing alternative storage
67. Client-side routing Use browser logic to load balance over frontend farms Reduce server load Remove a potential SPOF
68. Content Delivery Networks Static content Optimized for massive scaling Everything has a price – choose your optimizations wisely
69. Join us! http://jobs.tuenti.com
70. Internships Thesis Associate Engineer Engineer Senior Engineer
71. Thank you! jjmaestro@tuenti.com talent@tuenti.com