Being able to distribute large, widely -consumed objects (so-called hot content) efficiently to hosts is becoming increasingly important within Meta’s private cloud. These are commonly distributed content types such as executables, code artifacts, AI models, and search indexes that help enable our software systems.

Owl is a new system for high-fanout distribution of large data objects to hosts in Meta’s private cloud. It distributes over 700 petabytes of data per day to millions of client processes and has improved download speeds and cache hit rate by a factor of 2-3x over BitTorrent and other prior systems used for distribution at Meta.

Read the full blog on the Engineering site.