Research

Tectonic is Facebook’s exabyte-scale distributed filesystem. Tectonic consolidates large tenants that previously used service-specific systems into general multitenant filesystem instances that achieve performance comparable to the specialized systems. The exabyte-scale consolidated instances enable better resource utilization, simpler services, and less operational complexity than our previous approach. This paper describes Tectonic’s design, explaining how it achieves scalability, supports multitenancy, and allows tenants to specialize operations to optimize for diverse workloads. The paper also presents insights from designing, deploying, and operating Tectonic.