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Facebook Tech Infrastructure Needs Constant Care

Jonathan Heiliger, the top technology exec at the huge social networking site, talks about his efforts to build a technology operations team at Facebook that can both handle millions of users worldwide and a restless, creative culture inside the company.
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What did you figure out?

There's not a lot of formal process and structure in place. Here, [the culture dictates that] you can't dip a toe. You have to dive in headfirst and wrestle crocodiles. My first mission here was to build credibility and explain what technology operations does. Until that point, it was ambiguous what engineering, IT and operations each did.

How did you draw the lines between them?

We're constantly looking at the lines. It's not static at Facebook. Most IT organizations love to control change. I threw that out when I came. We're not going to try to control change, but speed it up. We trained people to be pushers. We do a major release once a week and minor releases every few days. Recently, we did some underlying changes- to photo gallery layout, for example, or starting using more Ajax calls on the site so the page refreshes are more seamless.

We created a 24x7 team in operations to be the stewards of cyber liability. Instead of calling them a NOC or help desk, we called them the "cyber liability group." If someone wants to do something dumb or push bad code, the team can revert it. There are 20 people, split between Palo Alto, California, and London, to follow the sun. No one has to work graveyard shift.

One thing we try to balance is, since Facebook is first and foremost a technology company, we don't want to stifle change and innovation. We'd rather innovate and have a little mess to clean up than run something reliable but stale. That's tough to do at a bank, I imagine. The IT organization at a large bank wouldn't have that flexibility-there's other people's money at stake, regulatory oversight.

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