The difficulty of partitioning social graphs has introduced new system design challenges for scaling of Online Social Networks (OSNs). Vertical scaling by resorting to full replication can be a costly proposition. Scaling horizontally by partitioning and distributing data among multiple servers using, for e.g., key-value stores using DHTs, can suffer from expensive inter-server communication and other performance issues. Such challenges have often led to costly re-architecting efforts for popular OSNs like Twitter and Facebook. This video presents a solution to these challenges.
