From the day Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, the site has been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, memcached, MySQL, and PHP. In that time, we've open sourced more than 20 different technologies, and scaled Facebook to reach over 350 million people around the world. Today we are pleased to announce that we are becoming a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which has been instrumental in fostering open source adoption and providing structure to build successful open source communities.
The ASF has over 100 different projects which all help the Web grow as it continues to evolve. As Jim Jagielski said, "sponsoring the ASF helps us grow existing projects, incubate new initiatives, promote community development, host user events, expand our outreach, and provide the infrastructure that keeps the Foundation running on a day-to-day basis." Beyond funding the ASF to help the organization grow, we really want to continue focusing on building, releasing, and fostering great open source software which tackle hard scaling problems.
If you read our engineering blog, you'll know that it's not possible to scale a site like Facebook simply by sharding your databases, but rather takes a combination of specialized technologies. Open source allows us not just to make technologies like memcached scale beyond its original intent, but to release technologies like Thrift for others to build upon as well.
Over the past two years we've contributed the following open source projects to the Apache Software Foundation. While there's still work to do, our goal is to build robust communities of both developers and users around each.
Thrift, Hive, and Cassandra join about 20 different technologies we've released as open source including Scribe, Tornado, a new JavaScript Connect library, and Three20 for iPhone development. We're excited to continue working on great open source projects and to support the ASF with funding, source code, and developers. There's plenty more to come.
David, senior open programs manager, is looking for people who like solving big problems and love working on open source. We're always looking for amazing engineers!