By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: November 16, 2013
At OSCON, Phil Dibowitz reminded me how little I understand about large systems – as he puts it, really large systems, systems of systems, with some similarities but with different people controlling parts. His work at Facebook explores the challenges (and opportunities) of creating tools that work across a company’s many networks and computers.
If you deal with such challenges, he’s worth listening to as a model. If not, he’s worth listening to for a sense of just how different work at this scale can be, though much of what he accomplishes can be worthwhile at scales much smaller than the 17,000 servers he describes for Facebook at 26:42 in the session.
