Twitter’s engineers work a lot. We now know that. We also now know that there are 200 of them who have been working since last June to make sure of one thing – that three data centers are better than one.
Today is Twitter’s five year anniversary, a fitting day to get a glimpse for how a new, upgraded infrastructure will give some guarantee that Twitter will be around for five more years and hopefully a lot longer than that.
In a revealing blog post yesterday by Twitter engineer Michael Abbott, we learn a lot has changed since last June when Twitter went down for ten hours. Have a breakdown like that and it raises questions about the future of any organization. Twitter recognizes that. The new infrastructure is Twitter’s core team telling us and trying to convince us that the service is built for long-term scalability with uptime a sure thing and not a question mark.
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Twitter is Hiring
First off, it’s only a last mention in the post but Twitter is hiring, looking for more to join its ranks.
Abbott:
P.S. Twitter is hiring across engineering and operations. If you want to develop novel systems that scale on the order of billions, join the flock.
That’s an important point. It shows that Twitter will continue to invest people into its infrastructure. It distinguishes Twitter as a world-class technology company that is building an intellectual capacity as much as anything else.
It also backs up what Abbott says are the long-term plans that Twitter made and began putting into place last September. A plan that Abbott writes will guarantee three things:
- Keep pace with capacity needs.
- Give the user and developer community better reliability.
- Allow for new product offerings.
The infrastructure sits at the core of the strategy. To start, the engineers replicated Twitter’s core systems to a second data center, where it moved, among other things, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet from @jack to the latest from @honeybadger. The second data center served as a staging laboratory for Twitter’s replication and migration strategies. Simultaneously, Twitter prepped its third larger data center as its final nesting ground.
And who is @honeybadger you may ask? Honeybadger is a Twitter creation that stopped by a Twitter company meeting last week. Honeybadger is hilarious.
We’re not sure what @honeybadger has to do with Twitter’s new data centers except for the entertainment quotient.
But the infrastructure investment is a confident step for Twitter, showing that it’s here for the long-run with a level of service users and developers expect from a world-class technology company.
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