Trillions of calls on Meta's serverless platform, Tech Talent Acquisition, Individual Performance Management
Newsletter - Issue #02
In this issue of groCTO 🚀 we’ve handpicked:
Our week’s favorite - Meta's serverless platform processes trillions of function calls a day
Other insightful pieces for CTOs:
And lastly, ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast with Eric Bowman, ex-CTO at TomTom
☁️ Meta's serverless platform processes trillions of function calls a day
Leo from
dug through a case study published by Meta last fall on how they operate an internal Function-as-a-service cloud. They claim it surpasses competitors at Google, AWS and Azure in cost efficiency and utilization.Named XFaaS, Meta engineers envisioned it to handle non-user facing data processing as its key responsibility. With a clever usage of delays and load balancing it can spread out utilization to any data center that is best fit to handle the load.
Comparisons with Public FaaS (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions)
Public cloud FaaS confines function executions to a single datacenter region, while XFaaS can dispatch function calls globally, allowing for better load balancing.
FaaS platforms focus on reducing latency first, overlooking hardware utilization. XFaaS focuses on hardware utilization and throughput of function calls.
What is curious in the paper is the focus on eliminating throughput noise by eliminating cold startup side effects with a combination of low-memory universal workers. The aim is to create an environment where most workers are ready to pickup work from any environment with minimal or no startup overhead.
How and at what cost they achieved this and other goals you can read in the expanded case study.
Why so serious?
🤝 The Tech talent acquisition landscape
from highlights different hiring and work organization strategies for optimising cost effectiveness and engineering capacity. The article captures 5 modes of talent acquisition that make remote-first teams faster and more flexible:
Take a look at the full article to explore their individual strengths and how to effectively combine them to meet the needs of your own organization.
⌚︎ Great CTO: Individual performance management
covers a series on unchallenged assumptions that shape people management incentives and habits in tech organizations. One of them is Individual performance management.Their article highlights frequent issues with incentive structures that have fear-based roots with no ability to nurture growth.
Individual Performance management is commonly seen as an antidote to:
the perceived issue of freeloading.
a worry of being unable to remove an employee deemed ‘underperforming’.
🤷🏼♂️ The full article explores alternatives to this approach, along with truth-seeking and OKR-based incentives.
groCTO: Originals | ‘Leading the way as a CTO’ with Eric Bowman
In the recent episode of ‘groCTO: Originals’ (Formerly: Beyond the Code), Host Kovid Batra engages in a thought-provoking discussion with Eric Bowman, ex-CTO at TomTom. He is also an advisory Board Member at reputed companies such as Banxware, momox GmbH, and Tradler.
Eric delves into the obstacles faced in his engineering journey and shares strategies for overcoming them. He also discusses the ‘Team Topologies’ approach, a valuable framework for improving team interactions. Lastly, Eric sheds light on crucial aspects such as developer productivity, well-being, and the holistic optimization of software delivery.
And that’s it for today! See you next week, Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators- Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Priyasha
Sponsors- This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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Impressive insights in the first part of the edition! XFaaS's hardware optimization and load handling strategies are game-changers. And the podcast is lit!