Database Design for Facebook Messenger

We still need to think about how we are going to store and persist these messages in our database When we think about what kind of database to choose for application, According you our requirements we know that we want to support a really large volume of requests and store a lot of messages. We also care a lot about the availability and uptime of our service so we want to pick a database that is going to fit these requirements.

We know from things like the CAP theorem that there are going to be some sort of universal trade-offs between principles like consistency, availability, and the ability to partition or shard our database. In our system, we want to focus on this ability to shard and partition and keep our database available rather than things like consistency which are less important in a messaging application than they would be in something like a financial application. So we would choose something like a NoSQL database that has built-in replication and sharding abilities so something like Cassandra or HBase would be great for this application.

Designing Facebook Messenger | System Design Interview

We are going to build a real-time Facebook messaging app, that can support millions of users. All the chat applications like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. can be built using the same design. In this article, we will discuss the high-level architecture of the system as well as some specific features like building real-time messaging, group messaging, image and video uploads as well and push notifications.

Important Topics for Facebook Messenger System Design

  • Requirements
  • Design of Facebook Messenger
  • Communication Protocol for Facebook Messenger
  • API Used for Facebook Messenger
  • Database Design for Facebook Messenger
  • Data Types
  • Scalability for Facebook Messenger
  • Conclusion

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Requirements

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Design of Facebook Messenger

Functional Requirements for Facebook Messenger:...

Communication Protocol for Facebook Messenger

Now let’s discuss the overall architecture of the app. Specifically, let’s see how we can send messages from one user to another:...

API Used for Facebook Messenger

What happens when user A sends a message to user B? What we require is that the user sends a message to the server and the server relays that message instantly to the user that it’s intended for. However, this way breaks the model of how HTTP requests work on the internet because they can’t be server-initiated rather they have to be client-initiated. So this isn’t going to work and we need to come up with something else....

Database Design for Facebook Messenger

Here we are taking only three API servers but in a real system, when we are trying to support hundreds of millions of users, we will need hundreds or thousands of API servers to support the huge amount of requests as one API server can handle only thousands of requests at a time....

Data Types

We still need to think about how we are going to store and persist these messages in our database When we think about what kind of database to choose for application, According you our requirements we know that we want to support a really large volume of requests and store a lot of messages. We also care a lot about the availability and uptime of our service so we want to pick a database that is going to fit these requirements....

Scalability for Facebook Messenger

So, how we are going to store and model this data in our database. We know we’re going to need a few key tables and features like users, and messages and we are also going to probably need this concept of conversations, which will be groups of users who are supposed to receive messages....

Conclusion

So in particular, one thing we are thinking about is the cost of going to our database and retrieving messages from it repeatedly so one thing we would like to add to the architecture is some sort of caching service or caching layer which would be like a read-through cache....