What powers Facebook...

[williag1]

Hello fellow Forum member (and apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum),

I have a rather random, abstract query...

I have a fairly good idea how Facebook works from a user/front perspective. But I was wondering if anyone knows of any literature of backend of Facebook? E.g. what powers Facebook? What skills would someone need if hypothetically speaking you wanted to build a Facebook equivalent from scratch?

I'm just genuinely curious. And since I appreciate it is far from a one sentence answer,I would be eternally grateful if someone knows of any good sources of information and it could be books, websites, anything really? I'd just like a starting point.

Thanks very much in advance.

 

[Baez]

It's basically a large unmanaged CMS written in PHP. Nothing a small team of competent programmers couldn't achieve. As for books and resources you'd be hard pressed to find any. As soon as you know web development or a programming language it's very easy to see how it's developed.

 

[remixedcat]

Also FB has thier own datacenters as well. There actually is an Open Sourced FB clone CMS being made right now as well.

 

[Slaymate]

Satanic Forces

 

[remixedcat]

Nice one Slay!!!!

 

[office politics]

A Day in the Life of Facebook Operations: Velocity 2010, Web Performance & Operations Conference - O'Reilly Conferences, June 22 - 24, 2010, Santa Clara, CA

 

[KidTech]

what powers facebook is actually simple PHP configured by hundreds of workers(FOR REAL)