Erlang Factory 2014 - That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp

Why HN readers recommended it

The go-to talk showing how Erlang let a tiny team run a massive messaging system.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Erlang Solutions

Topic

scaling erlang systems

Format

talk

Level

advanced

HN recommenders in dataset

6

HN mentions in dataset

15

Recommendation years in dataset

2014–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• My other favorite "scalability" study is from WhatsApp: [VIDEO] That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp (that walk title was create before the acquisition and was mean to imply message count, after the acquisition it got a secondary meaning). The …

• Not sure why this comment saw a couple downvotes earlier. mbesto is correct: for most startups, most of the time, competitive advantage doesn't come from the underlying tech stack. To make a general statement, most things could be done similarly on any of several platforms. …

• One of my favorite talks is by Rick Reed about scaling Erlang at WhatsApp. What an absolute savage. He flies through an articulate and in-depth curriculum on system performance and bottleneck mitigation. The talk is called "That's 'Billion' with a 'B'" and makes for a …