WhatsApp architecture Overview

Sold to Facebook at 19 billion dollars, the deal was further discouraged by Larry Page, and WhatsApp did win a brilliant victory. But it is not to be overlooked that the company's engineering team, which serves 450 million active users, is a mere 32. Recently Highscalability founder Tod Hoff wrote an analysis of the reasons for this day's purchase and WhatsApp's highly reliable structure, although not complete, but there are many worth learning.

The following is the translation:

From WHATSAPP software architect Rick Reed, in a presentation to be released in March (That's ' billion ' with a ' B ': Scaling to the "next Level" at WHATSAPP), We can learn some of WhatsApp's current contours:

Now that WhatsApp has hundreds of nodes, thousands of cores and hundreds of terabytes of memory, our goal is to serve billions of users worldwide. In WhatsApp, we used erlang/based on the FreeBSD server infrastructure, and in response to the growing demand for messages, we had to overcome one challenge after another, It can be said that the limit challenge on system capacity (more than 8000 cores) and speed (Erlang message 70 million per second) never stops!

Given that the speech was released in March, we could focus on how Rick Reed shared--whatsapp two years ago on how to deal with millions of of simultaneous links.

At Yahoo!, Rick Reed was responsible for building a high-performance message bus in C + +, so he was not unfamiliar with the highly scalable architecture. The founder of WhatsApp also includes a Yahoo! engineer with extensive experience, and it is not difficult to know that WhatsApp's achievements are inseparable from the extraordinary technology of the two founders. and attempts to become the world's 5 billion mobile phone service provider's ambitious goal, they must also push the technology to the limit!

19 billion dollar deal behind

As a programmer, if you ask WhatsApp whether it is worth so much, my answer must be negative! Because the real value of the product is not in the rigid code, but in how to make users like and use.

Looking at the characteristics of this application, we know that WhatsApp is a world-class 0 gimmick (0 ads, 0 creative, 0 games) products that provide a free information interchange platform in the era of SMS billing. Now, this application has been used by a large number of Americans, so once a user joins, it will find a large number of friends and relatives. In an age when mobile phones are so pervasive, WhatsApp is definitely filling the gap in American social networks. Because of its cross-platform nature, everyone can use it, and it is worth noting that it can also deliver a variety of formatting information, such as sharing geographic locations, sending voice and video, and so on. WhatsApp has a very good internationalization, using mobile phone numbers as a validation information, contact list as a social graph, so you do not need to verify the mailbox, username and password, but also do not need to provide credit card information-"It ethically works."

Although WhatsApp has such seductive features, it is still not worth 19 billion of dollars, and for the internet giants, such features are not complicated.

WhatsApp can sell 19 billion of dollars for several reasons: 1th, as Google CEO Larry page says, 2,whatsapp has threatened Facebook, 3,facebook is fading and needs a lot of fresh blood, and 4th, WhatsApp is your phone book; 5,whatsapp can collect a large amount of metadata (although they are not saved).

To be exact, the 19 billion dollar acquisition WhatsApp is for its 450 million users, for its millions of users to increase, in order to it may have 1 billion user potential Facebook need WhatsApp become the next 1 billion user applications, of course, can only become part of it. At the same time, the price of a user of 40 dollars is not outrageous, especially in terms of the amount of stock. Facebook used to buy Instagram at a price of 30 dollars per user, while Twitter was worth 110 dollars per user.

Benedict Evans made a great prediction that mobile is a trillion-tier market. WhatsApp has disrupted the entire SMS market by sending 18 billion SMS messages a day (and only 20 billion messages a day for the entire SMS system), and the market has a tax of more than 100 million dollars. In an era of increasingly popular smartphones, Whasapp has a clearer idea of profitability than Facebook. But where does Facebook benefit from the promise of 0 of ads and 0 of intervention?

There are many interesting use cases in mobile application business development, and WhatsApp is often used by the project team to establish conversation groups, and VCs are happy to use it as a dialogue tool in the trading process.

Instagram was Kuwait used to sell sheep.

Wechat,whatsapp, a competitor, launched a taxi service in January; it is worth noting that in just one months, the volume of taxis in this application reached 21 million.

The business does seem to suit WhatsApp, but it's obviously more useful-the Spanish police use it to catch criminals, and Italians use it to organize basketball games.

Since everyone has a mobile phone and messaging applications have become more powerful, free and inexpensive, commercial and other types of applications have gradually transitioned to the mobile end. Many features are no longer available only on desktop or Web applications, and messaging applications have been emerged.

Many of these apps have threatened Facebook and Google, and the desktop and the Internet will be in the past, and the message + move will leave the entire system more out of the realm of these giants.

As the move goes deeper, Facebook's position is becoming more precarious, and the flow of users is clearly inevitable. The desktop web is the gateway to all the features of the back end of Facebook, which is very fat, complex, and stale, and few people have ever liked Facebook's UI.

After Facebook identified the mobile-this move solution, deeper grinding was performed-not only for different applications, but also for a number of similar and competing applications that sometimes do not even share the same background infrastructure. For example: Messenger and Whatsapp,instagram and Facebook image applications. Monitors is also a limited-function alternate entrance to Facebook, but it's doing very well.

On Mobile World Congress, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg his view that the acquisition of WhatsApp is closely linked to Internet.org's vision:

The idea is to create a set of basic Internet Free Services-"911 of the Internet", which may be social networking services, messaging services, and search services like Facebook. Provide these services to those who can afford to pay but do not pay the awareness of the users, to lure them into the addiction, so that they know their importance, and thus more willing to use more fee-based services.

It's a long-term goal, and there's plenty of interest in the arena to chase, but the real rate of return is very low, and Facebook is on the way.

Aside from this deal, WhatsApp is how to use 32 engineers to support 450 million of active users, the following explore ...

High-reliable architecture for

service 450 million users


Information Source

It should be noted that the overall architecture of the WhatsApp is not disclosed, and this is simply to get different fragments from different sources of information. Rick Reed's lectures mainly shared the use of Erlang to achieve a single server 2 million connection, although valuable, but not the entire application architecture.

Rick Reed: Expand to millions of concurrent connections (in PPT) Rick Reed:erlang Factory (interview) Eugene Fooksman:whatsapp Erlang Use (interview) DLD14: About WhatsApp (Koum and David Rowan) Yowsup is an open source API for WhatsApp, but it is not available now because the DMCA is deprecated, but it can also explain some of the internal working mechanisms of WhatsApp. Some of the information that is listed in the related article. I. Statistics

These statistics are some of the data for the current system, more for data storage, messages, meta-clustering, and newly added BEAM/OTP patches.

450 million active users, and is the fastest in the history of the company to achieve this number 32 engineers, the average of 14 million active users per person to send and receive each day across 7 platforms 50 billion messages per day registered users over 百万0 advertising costs 8 million investment hundreds of nodes 8000+ Core hundreds of TB memory per second Erlang messages more than 70 million in 2011, the WhatsApp single server obtained 1 million TCP sessions with memory and CPU remaining. In 2012, the TCP session developed to 2 million. 2013 WhatsApp issued a tweet statement, 7 billion message into the station, 11 billion news to fight, that is, handling 18 billion messages a day, the great 2013!

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