A Look Back and Facebook's 'Look Back' Videos

Remember those ‘Look Back’ videos that Facebook had for their 10^th anniversary?  You know the ones—a bunch of pictures you don’t want to see about people you don’t care about.  Well, it took A LOT of computing power to make that happen.  How much?  Enough to render 9 million videos per hour.

Facebook’s ‘Look Back’ videos

Facebook’s recent blog post about the whole thing is pretty amazing.  In less than a month, they set up the infrastructure, coded the videos, and rendered 9 million videos per hour without sacrificing quality and while also rolling out other projects (like the awesome ‘Paper’ app) and gearing up for high-traffic times like the 2014 Winter Olympics.  I hope to God people got some OT hours out of that. 

What they did was add more server power, upped bandwidth and implemented more than 25 petabytes of disk space to be able to render and store videos.  Also, their data centers weren’t built for running power at full capacity at all times, so they isolated the servers used so that it wouldn’t screw with the rest of the site’s functionality.  They ran a small test with employees and tracked data and power usage and then adjusted accordingly for when the full roll out happened.

All in all, they rendered and stored over 720 million videos, used 11 petabytes of storage, 450 Gbps of outgoing bandwidth and more than 200 million people watched and shared their movie within the first two days.

Pretty impressive for the most annoying thing of all time (just kidding). 

[Facebook Blog]

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