Facebook feeds open source community with 'mcrouter'

Summary: Facebook engineers boasted that mcrouter can also work in an Amazon Web Services setup based on Instagram's deployment.

By Rachel King for Between the Lines | September 15, 2014 -- 17:55 GMT (23:25 IST)

Facebook is kicking off the week with a number of new bullet points on its open source agenda.

Introduced at the @Scale technical summit in San Francisco on Monday, the social network is targeting engineers who build or maintain systems that are designed for scale.

More about Facebook's infrastructure:

• Facebook details two years of work to turn on default HTTPS
• Facebook explains how 'TAO' serves social workloads, data requests
• Facebook devs explain how it maps user connections to other 'entities'
• Facebook translates natural language interface under Graph Search
• Facebook engineers reveal how Parse fits into Platform, B2B strategies
• Facebook releasing new Social Graph database benchmark: LinkBench
• Facebook reveals the makings behind App Center recommendation engine
• Understanding Unicorn: A deep dive into Facebook's Graph Search

The first project is dubbed "mcrouter," a memcached protocol being unleashed under an open-source BSD license.

Facebook itself uses mcrouter for managing all traffic to, from, and between thousands of cache servers across dozens of clusters distributed in Facebook data centers around the world.

The Facebook Engineering team posited in a blog post on Monday that the code will "help many sites scale more easily by leveraging Facebook’s knowledge about large-scale systems in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-deploy package."