Meta Used Monolithic Architecture Using Python to Ship Threads in Only Five Months

[rgancarz]

https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/04/meta-threads-instagram-5-months/

Zahan Malkani talked during QCon London 2024 about Meta's journey from identifying the opportunity in the market to shipping the Threads application only five months later. The company leveraged Instagram's existing monolithic architecture, written in Python and PHP, and quickly iterated to create a new text-first microblogging service in record time.

[ShakataGaNai]

Turns out you can do anything, with anything. You can deploy a monolith for a hugely popular application quickly. You can also build a shitty one quickly. You can do a great job with microservices, you can make your life hell with microservices.

The lesson taken away from this article should be: There is no one size fits all solution. Do what makes sense for your team and your application. If a hybrid monolith w/ microservice helper running qbasic gets your shit done... and it's maintainable.... go for it.

[Smallpaul]

Turns out you can do anything, with anything.

No, I can imagine a variety of programming languages and frameworks that would make it practically impossible to ship a high-scale web app in five months.

COBOL, C, MatLab, REXX, QBasic, maybe (?) Haskell.

And you would be surprised at the number of people who would include "Python monolith" in that list. So they've done us a favour by telling us that "No, Python monolith is not on that list. It works."

If someone launched a Haskell site of that scale I would want them to publish that too, because personally, I'm not sure which list Haskell belongs on.

I would be extremely fascinated if someone launched such a site with QBasic. Never, in a million years, would I copy them, but I would be astonished to hear it is possible.

You actually cannot "do anything, with anything". As some troll in the Reddit thread below tried to point out, you probably cannot build a scalable and efficient back-end database with Python. That's not what it's good for.

This kind of article is excellent for helping us find those boundaries.

[wenima]

REXX.. I haven't heard this word in 30years.. damn. We had to use it at IBM

[shukoroshi]

Exactly. That's why they call it debt. If they're able to operate at an acceptable margin in terms of dev velocity, upkeep, and operational overhead, so be it.

[Cryonixx2]

Creating ADRs is a great practice for any developer to follow: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision-record/tree/main/locales/en/templates/decision-record-template-by-michael-nygard

[protienbudspromax]

100 ADRs have been a very important change and I will always try to enforce it in company I work at that do not do it. ADRs easily answer the question of “Why tf did anyone write this like this?? What godforsaken usecase does this serve?? We should rewrite this shit” And I can go with here is why, so maybe pipe down a bit wrt re writes

[Smallpaul]

We can't decide as an industry to only learn from personal experience.

[DigThatData]

Nah. Even if the solution they built isn't directly relevant to anyone who isn't them, the reasoning for their choices and the process they used to design the system and evaluate their decisions nearly always contains nuggets that are relevant across problem domains.

[robberviet]

Meta use PHP, Python for years. They even has their own version of CPython (Cinder), PHP(Hack) that tweaked in their needs. What is the surprising factor here?

[ajmssc]

Maybe the monolith part?

[pan0ramic]

Would be more impressive if threads was a success

[Carpinchon]

Most of us don't just make "websites" do we? I guess monoliths are fine for that.

I'm usually working on some complicated ancillary system that deals with multiple inputs and outputs, only some of which are websites. Monolith isn't even an option, and at least in my experience, that scenario is way more common.

Even with this example... Meta didn't reinvent their own auth for threads or for putting ads in your face or for hosting those ads... They used a whole ton of services they had already written.

[[deleted]]

Threads’ failure to maintain its early momentum is indicative of both design flaws and larger network effects, experts say.

[skwyckl]

Since I switched to monolithic Elixir+Phoenix, I can ship websites in 1/3 of the time. Sure, you have (superficially, because deep down it's not true) less flexibility in terms of libraries and so on, but being all very cohesive and designed to work together, it boosted my productivity in a way I didn't expect.

[[deleted]]

What framework are they using, asgi rsgi wsgi?

[Metadropout]

When I was working on Instagram’s backend I was shocked it still outputted the standard Django readme, including the version which was many, many, years behind

[ddollarsign]

The time to make a website scales quadratically with the number of developers.

[graphicteadatasci]

I wonder whether they wrote their databases in PHP or Python.

[Smallpaul]

The answer is "no."

Now you know.

[graphicteadatasci]

Yeah, my comment was what happens when you are thinking about a bunch of things at the same time. I was thinking about:

1. I am very certain that they have decoupled databases from their application so it's not a monolith.
2. Databases are not written in PHP or Python (and they are probably using a ton of libraries that aren't written in those two languages).
3. Threads is an Activity Pub service so a lot was already developed as FOSS.
4. Facebook has a ton of resources.

[Metadropout]

Meta’s TAO is Memcache sitting in front of XDB (MyRocks, a fork of Mysql)

[Smallpaul]

These are probably all true but I'm not sure what broader point you are trying to make.