Lloyd Taylor: LinkedIn's 'scaling guru' tackles the social graph
Earlier this month I spoke with Lloyd Taylor, vice president of technical operations at LinkedIn and formerly Google's director of global operations and Keynote Systems' vice president of technology and operations. He discusses his past experience building and scaling data centers at Google and how it differs from his new role, managing a high value and less trafficked network (17 million members) at LinkedIn:
"The challenge in scaling LinkedIn is really not the number of visits. I mean, this is a high value site as opposed to a super high traffic site. So, the big challenge there is the key value in any kind of social networking or business networking site is the graph or the connectivity map of how people are connected. It is a very complex graph theory problem. And the big challenge here for me and it is very different than my previous companies is not how do I handle a billion queries per second, it’s how do I get the maximum value for my users out of their connectivity."
We also discuss interoperability among social networking sites and how Google threw out the book on how to build data centers.
See also:
Google: Rewriting the book on data centers