Networking Group

About Networking Group

Facebook was built to help nearly 1.5 billion people connect and share, and over the last decade our tools have played a critical part in changing how people around the world communicate with one another. At this scale and rate of growth, we face new challenges on a daily basis. As Facebook grows and evolves, new network workloads arise with increasingly demanding performance and reliability requirements. Our mission is to make it possible to support such workloads. At Facebook, we are constantly building the next generation systems that will be scalable, efficient, reliable and easy to use.

From Layer 1-4, we write the software that helps build, deploy, control, and monitor the entire Facebook network, connecting all hundreds of thousands of servers in our fleet to each other and to the Internet. Traditional networking doesn’t work well at this scale, so we write a lot of software to make the network work. We work closely with Facebook’s datacenter, backbone, corporate, and operations teams. We also work with the Traffic team on the network within the POPs. Increasingly, we provide network services to other infrastructure and engineering groups across Facebook.

From Layer 4-7, we build global and local load balancers, acceleration proxies, RPC frameworks, content delivery networks, and mobile networking stacks, plus the automation machinery that’s required to operate an internet scale edge network and handle all of Facebook’s DNS and HTTP traffic. We operate a large network of POPs around the world that we use to accelerate site traffic and cache CDN content. We glue these varied network services together in order to orchestrate the delivery of bits from our servers to your phone or desktop.

Aside from internal impact, we contribute to the academic community as well. We publish our work in top-tier scientific conferences, such as SIGCOMM and NSDI. Following the Facebook culture of openness and sharing, we also contribute several of its projects to the open source community. Projects like Thrift, Proxygen, FBOSS and OpenBMC were developed by us and are now used by different organizations.