In this presentation, Ian Flint, Director of Operations for Bix, Yahoo!’s online contest service, tries to explain the infrastructure and architecture employed by Yahoo! to keep going a multitude of servers running of different platforms and offering different services.
Watch: Ian Flint Explains Yahoo! Communities Architectures (1 hour)
Yahoo! has acquired a series of different companies having different products running on different platforms like: Del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Mail, Bix. Yahoo! has managed to create a community of products well integrated into a large family.
Ian briefly explains the hardware infrastructures used by Yahoo!, then he offers more details on the software infrastructure. The predominant OS is FreeBSD and it is progressively moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). MySQL is the main database used, followed by Oracle. There are several development platforms: PHP, C/C++, Java, Python.
Ian continues by explaining the software infrastructure used for Yahoo! Bix, showing how Yahoo! manages to provide 99.95% up time for their service. After detailing on the operational infrastructure, Ian concludes with processes and standards used by Yahoo! to keep running thousands of machines over different continents.