Chapter 15. Case studies, part 2
This chapter covers
- Facebook case study
- Twitter case study
In this chapter we’ll see how Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social networks, are using Netty. Each has exploited Netty’s flexible and generic design to build frameworks and services that meet requirements for extreme scalability and extensibility.
The case studies presented here were written by the engineers responsible for the design and implementation of the solutions described.
15.1. Netty at Facebook: Nifty and SwiftThe views expressed in this sec- ction are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s employer.
Andrew Cox, Software Engineer at Facebook
At Facebook we use Netty in several of our back-end services (for handling messaging traffic from mobile phone apps, for HTTP clients, and so on), but our fastest-growing usage is via two new frameworks we’ve developed for building Thrift services in Java: Nifty and Swift.
Thrift is a framework for building services and clients that communicate via remote procedure calls (RPC). It was originally developed at Facebook[2] to meet our requirements for building services that can handle certain types of interface mismatches between client and server. This comes in very handy because services and their clients usually can’t all be upgraded simultaneously.