Communications of the ACM
Fail at Scale
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Failure is part of engineering any large-scale system. One of Facebook's cultural values is embracing failure. This can be seen in the posters hung around the walls of our Menlo Park headquarters: "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?" and "Fortune Favors the Bold."
To keep Facebook reliable in the face of rapid change we study common patterns in failures and build abstractions to address them. These abstractions ensure best practices are applied across our entire infrastructure. To guide our work in building reliability abstractions, we must understand our failures. We do this by building tools to diagnose issues and by creating a culture of reviewing incidents in a way that pushes us to make improvements that prevent future failures.
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