The Infoq Podcast

Wesley Reisz talks to Sachin Kulkarni, Director of Engineering at Facebook, about the engineering challenges for Facebook live, and how it compares to the video upload platform at Facebook. Why listen to this podcast: - Facebook Infrastructure powers the board family of apps including the Facebook app, Messenger and Instagram. It is largely a C++ shop. There is some Java and Python, and the business logic is all done in PHP. The iOS apps are written in Objective C and the Android apps are in Java. - The video infra team at Facebook builds the video infrastructure across the whole company. Projects include a distributed video encoding platform which results in low latency video encoding, video upload and ingest. - Facebook Live does encoding on both the client and the server. The trade-off between encoding on the client side and the server side is mostly around the quality of the video vs. latency and reliability. - Facebook gets around 10x speed-up by encoding data in parallel compared to serial