Research

Social media platforms deliver fresh personalized content by performing a large number of reads from an online data store. This store must be optimized for read efficiency, availability, and scalability. Multi-layer caches and asynchronous replication can satisfy these goals, such as in Facebook’s graph store TAO, but it is challenging for the resulting system to provide a developer-friendly consistency model. TAO originally provided read-your-writes (RYW) consistency via write-through caching, but scaling challenges with this approach have led us to a new implementation.

This paper introduces FlightTracker, a family of APIs and systems which now manage consistency for online access to Facebook’s graph. FlightTracker implicitly provides RYW and can be explicitly used to provide alternative consistency guarantees for special use cases; it enables flexible communication patterns between caches, which we have found important as the number of datacenters increases; it extends the same consistency guarantees to cross-shard indexes and materialized views, allowing us to transparently optimize queries; and it provides a uniform primitive for clients to obtain desired consistency guarantees across a variety of data stores. FlightTracker delivers these advantages while preserving the efficiency, latency, and availability benefits of asynchronous replication for the underlying systems, managing consistency for billions of users and more than 10¹⁵ queries per day.

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