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A comment on The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars.

Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by regularfry on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @07:23AM (#3821670)
I'm intrigued they went with XFS for the filesystem. Is there any more info on the thinking behind that decision?
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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by Terretta on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @08:30AM (#3821831)
They pointed out the thinking behind it. If you check out Eric Hammond's blog at Alestic, it expands on what was mentioned here:

http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot

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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by regularfry on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @09:42AM (#3822109)
Excellent, thanks for that. Looks mostly like a legacy decision which wouldn't necessarily hold today.
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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by wazoox on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @10:06AM (#3822202)
Except for the part where you want integrity; AFAIK only xfs guarantees truly atomic snapshotting thanks to xfs_freeze.

Furthermore, it's also (by an extremely large margin) your best choice if you need a filesystem bigger than 16 TB.

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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by regularfry on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @11:53AM (#3822752)
Allegedly other filesystems have had a similar freeze added since then.
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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by wazoox on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @03:52PM (#3824043)
Actually it was added to the vfs layer IIRC, around 2.6.30.
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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by riledhel on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @10:56AM (#3822419)
Why wouldn't? is there a better alternative to freeze a filesystem and take a AWS snapshot from it?
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Re:The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Bil... by regularfry on Tuesday April 10, 2012 @11:55AM (#3822772)
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6... would indicate that the ability to freeze has been added to other filesystems since ec2-consistent-snapshot was first written. I've got no data on whether they're equivalently robust. If freezing was the only reason to go for xfs, then that decision would seem to be open to more alternatives now.
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