Sayed Alesawy

Sayed Alesawy

Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale

Aug 13, 202115 min read

A while ago, I published two articles discussing facebook's storage infrastructure. The first article discussed facebook's hot storage system called Haystack which at the time was used for both hot and warm storage. Then in the second article, I di...

Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale

Learn MySQL Internals and Query Performance Optimization Techniques

Jul 10, 20215 min read

Over the course of the past few months, I have been publishing articles summarizing a really nice book called High Performance MySQL. I have only posted about the first 7 chapters which I think are the most essential ones for anyone learning relation...

Learn MySQL Internals and Query Performance Optimization Techniques

Facebook Storage Infrastructure: How Facebook Cuts Costs by Managing BLOB Storage Life Cycle

Jun 26, 202118 min read

A couple of weeks ago, I published an article about how facebook serves millions of photos per second which discussed the design of the Haystack Storage System. Facebook’s corpus of photos, videos, and other Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) that need to ...

Facebook Storage Infrastructure: How Facebook Cuts Costs by Managing BLOB Storage Life Cycle

High Performance MySQL [Ch.7: Advanced MySQL Features]

Jun 19, 202113 min read

So in the previous chapter we discussed query performance optimization techniques such as, improving data access types or restructuring queries. In this chapter will go over some of the advanced features that MySQL has to offer and see how we can lev...

High Performance MySQL [Ch.7: Advanced MySQL Features]

Amazon Aurora: MySQL on Steroids

Jun 15, 20212 min read

A couple of weeks, I published a series of three articles explaining two papers published by the AWS Aurora team. The papers discussed the internal design of Aurora and the design considerations for building high throughput cloud-native database. The...

Amazon Aurora: MySQL on Steroids

Testing Ruby on Rails Applications Using Rspec

Jun 11, 202112 min read

An essential part of any Software Engineer's daily development flow is writing tests. We write tests to: Try different things while developing. To artificially simulate some corner cases that are really hard to produce organically. To gain confidenc...

Testing Ruby on Rails Applications Using Rspec