Scaling Facebook Live

Federico Larumbe went up the stack and described the challenges with distributed systems and Facebook Live. Facebook Live enables people to share their experiences and perspectives in real time with those who matter to them — whether they’re someone who wants to broadcast to friends and family, or a public figure who wants to connect with fans around the world. Federico showed the unique challenges of Live traffic, with its sudden and massive bursts in bandwidth, and then covered how Facebook addressed challenges like the thundering herd problem (using request coalescing), anticipating the sudden bandwidth increases (with predictive cubic splines), and handling the varied available bandwidth that each client has with adaptive bit rate encoding.