"It's Just A Website"

A global-scale tech company faces a broad and deep set of technical, organizational, and legal challenges that are often unintuitive or unknown to people who have never worked at that scale. This is a talk about the very real threats facing a such a company, through the eyes of a former Facebook SRE. Although many complex technical systems are discussed, the majority of the talk will be accessible to anyone, regardless of level of technical knowledge.

We'll dive into a broad range of threats and challenges facing any global application, along with a few that are specific to a social network such as Facebook or Twitter.

Among many others, we'll cover the insane difficulty (and consequences of failure) of protecting user data privacy, maintaining your own datacenters, fighting spam/misinformation campaigns, and ensuring app consistency and reliability despite constant development by thousands of engineers.

Although many of these problems are only relevant directly when you're operating at a scale where your every move is in the evening news and even AWS is cost-prohibitive, there's still a lot to be learned for businesses of any size:
* We can learn more about the challenges facing our providers and partners, and craft better relationships and integrations as a result.
* We can learn from the mistakes and successes of those who went before us, and improve our practices and systems for source control, CI, security, and data privacy. While most of us won't ever become Facebook, we will need to scale our systems as we grow our products and companies, and there's a lot to learn about how to do that more safely and efficiently.