If you were evaluating a system design for anti-patterns, you might look for the following characteristics:

• significant amounts of global, mutable data with a very high update rate requiring ACID semantics
• serve application data with no natural sharding (i.e. partitioning) dimension
• data storage-level hot-spotting
• interactive latency requirements for a global base of users

These undesirable characteristics in your system, however, are precisely the desirable characteristics of your application! They form the basis of critical features needed for any successful Social network, and many socially-enabled applications.

Come and hear about the tradeoffs explored and design idioms we discovered as we built Google's Social infrastructure.

Marc Alvidrez is a Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer with Google. He joined the company in 2004, and starting as an early SRE he has led a variety of teams responsible for both infrastructure and major user-facing services. These have included the first team responsible for Google File System (GFS), and the teams responsible for Google's Display and AdSense advertising serving systems, Google+ and Google Photos. Prior to Google he held systems engineering roles at Vodafone and Internet startup Topica, where he was the Director of Operations.