Today Twitter is creating and persisting 3,000 (200 GB) images per second. Even better, in 2015 Twitter was able to save $6 million due to improved media storage policies.

It was not always so. Twitter in 2012 was primarily text based. A Hogwarts without all the cool moving pictures hanging on the wall. It’s now 2016 and Twitter has moved into to a media rich future. Twitter has made the transition through the development of a new Media Platform capable of supporting photos with previews, multi-photos, gifs, vines, and inline video.

Henna Kermani, a Software Development Engineer at Twitter, tells the story of the Media Platform in an interesting talk she gave at Mobile @Scale London: 3,000 images per second. The talk focuses primarily on the image pipeline, but she says most of the details also apply to the other forms of media as well.

Some of the most interesting lessons from the talk:

• Doing the simplest thing that can possibly work can really screw you. The simple method of uploading a tweet with an image as an all or nothing operation was a form of lock-in. It didn’t scale well, especially on poor networks, which made it difficult for Twitter to add new features.

• Decouple. By decoupling media upload from tweeting Twitter was able independently optimize each pathway and gain a lot of operational flexibility. 

• Move handles not blobs. Don’t move big chunks of data through your system. It eats bandwidth and causes performance problems for every service that has to touch the data. Instead, store the data and refer to it with a handle.

• Moving to segmented resumable uploads resulted in big decreases in media upload failure rates.

• Experiment and research. Twitter found through research that a 20 day TTL (time to live) on image variants (thumbnails, small, large, etc) was a sweet spot, a good balance between storage and computation. Images had a low probability of being accessed after 20 days so they could be deleted, which saves nearly 4TB of data storage per day, almost halves the number of compute servers needed, and saves millions of dollars a year.

• On demand. Old image variants could be deleted because they could be recreated on the fly rather than precomputed. Performing services on demand increases flexibility, it lets you be lot smarter about how tasks are performed, and gives a central point of control.

• Progressive JPEG is a real winner as a standard image format. It has great frontend and backend support and performs very well on slower networks.

Lots of good things happened on Twitter’s journey to a media rich future, let’s learn how they did it...

The Old Way - Twitter in 2012