Baby Steps - Evolution of the Tumblr Architecture

Over the past year Tumblr has experienced tremendous growth, with traffic more than tripling from 5B pageviews a month to over 16B pageviews a month. Tumblr started in 2007 as a traditional LAMP application with some memcache usage. Over the past year Tumblr has moved towards a service oriented distributed system built on the JVM and supported by heavily sharded MySQL along with HBase and Redis. In this talk we'll review the historical evolution of the Tumblr architecture, highlight places where we stumbled and things didn't work, and cover the future growth plans for the system.