Revolutionary Road: Communication, Scheduling AND Fun

  PM Network  

"Move fast” is one of our core values at Facebook. And we do for the most part. But the need for speed gets more complicated when it comes to bleeding-edge technologies.

Last December, I was asked to provide project management support for a one-of-a-kind project deploying a new, more cost-effective and robust software to store photos after they were uploaded. This was big. When you house billions of photo objects and traffic is in the gigabytes, maintaining stability for customers is paramount.

Before we move on, there are a couple of important points to keep in mind:

• The code for this technology was, for all intents and purposes, complete.
• The hardware device was unique—specifically built out to meet the needs of this project.

The goal was to maintain the photo architecture we already had in place while we pushed the limits—of both technology and time—in moving to the new solution.

Finding bugs

The early delivery estimate to direct all new photo uploads to the new platform was two months. We started off by limiting risk. To do this, the engineers devised a way to write photos to both storage platforms. Next, we worked out a way to increment the number of uploads going to the new platform. For the first two weeks, we started at 10 percent. And then, as long as there were no issues, we stepped up the amount over…

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