Facebook douses virtualisation
Facebook refuses to employ virtualisation across its infrastructure, because the technology does not scale efficiently, the director of the social networking site's labs division has said.
The social network shies away from abstracting its technology into virtual machines because at large-scale, the economics don't work out and the cost of dealing with hardware failures is too high, Gio Coglitore of Facebook Labs, said at a press event on Tuesday.
"We find within our testing that a realised [non-virtualised] environment brings efficiencies and the ability to scale much more effectively," Coglitore said. "When we look at the operational realities, we very much would like to lose a server and not have it impact our experience, but as your start to virtualise the importance of that server becomes enhanced and at scale becomes difficult."
