SEATTLE _ More than 2 billion people log into Facebook every month. Every day, the social-media crowd uploads billions of photos, calls up hundreds of millions of hours of video, and fires off a prodigious flurry of likes and comments. Somebody has to store that slice of humanity's digital record.
Much of that task falls to Surendra Verma, a Seattle engineer who for more than 20 years has been building software that files away and retrieves large volumes of data.
Verma leads the storage team at Facebook, the group charged with making sure that the social network can accommodate its daily deluge without losing someone's wedding photos.
Most of that unit is based in Seattle, part of a workforce that today numbers 1,600 people, up from just 400 three years ago. That makes Facebook one of the fastest- growing technology companies _ outside of Amazon, anyway _ in the city.
While Facebook employees work on a wide range of products in Seattle, the office has developed a specialty in the geeky realm of systems software.
About a quarter of the Facebook engineers in Seattle work on the company's infrastructure projects, the tools to transmit, store and analyze the growing heap of data people feed into the social network.
That's a common trade in the region, where Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google are all building their own clouds _ giant, globe-straddling networks of data centers and the software that manages them.
Facebook could have built its products on computing power rented from those cloud giants, but it decided to build its own tools, from custom hardware designs all the way to mobile applications. Supporting Facebook's network are nine massive data centers _ a 10th, in Ohio, was announced earlier this month.
Facebook's cloud is different from the others' in that it's designed to support just one customer: Facebook's own apps.
They happen to be some of the most widely used pieces of software in the world _ and their use keeps expanding.
