Thread by @alexxubyte

How does Twitter work? Let’s take a look at it from the architectural point of view before Elon takes it.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐓𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐭:
1️⃣ A tweet comes in through the Write API.
2️⃣ The Write API routes the request to the Fanout service.

#twitter #systemdesign

3️⃣ The Fanout service does a lot of processing and stores them in the Redis cache.
4️⃣ The Timeline service is used to find the Redis server that has the home timeline on it.
5️⃣ A user pulls their home timeline through the Timeline service.

𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 & 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲
🔹 Ingester: annotates and tokenizes Tweets so the data can be indexed.
🔹 Earlybird: stores search index.
🔹 Blender: creates the search and discovery timelines.

𝐏𝐮𝐬𝐡 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐞
🔹HTTP push
🔹Mobile push

Disclaimer: This article is based on the tech talk given by Twitter in 2013 (bit.ly/3vNfjRp). Even though many years have passed, it’s still quite relevant. I redraw the diagram as the original diagram is difficult to read.

Over to you:
What are some of the biggest differences between Twitter and Facebook that might shape their system architectures?

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