Facebook looks and feels like a single application, like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. But behind the scenes, in the company’s data centers, you’ll find that the world’s most popular social network is really a multitude of different applications working in concert.
Facebook engineers build these applications using a wide range of programming languages, picking a language that matches the requirements of each project. That helps them fashion more efficient software, but it creates new challenges when it comes time to meld all these tools together, to ensure they can all communicate. To solve this issue, Facebook built a tool called Thrift, a means of managing communications between all its various applications.