 "Twitter to join The Linux Foundation as “Silver” tier member")
Twitter is all set to join the Linux Foundation as a “Silver” tier member, according to a report by Ars Technica. The microblogging platform is the latest in a slew of large IT companies such as Samsung, Nvidia, and Broadcom signing up with the non-profit organisation. PCWorld reports that Twitter will announce on Tuesday that it is joining the foundation. Twitter will pay $15,000 as joining fees.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit organisation that sponsors further development of the Linux kernel through corporate sponsorship from a lot of large IT companies. Like many websites that handle endless web traffic, Twitter runs on thousands of Linux servers. Over 400,000,000 tweets are sent out every day on Twitter at an average steady rate of 4,500 tweets a second, according to Chris Aniszczyk, Manager of Open Source for Twitter.
“Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” Aniszczyk said in a statement. “By joining the Linux Foundation we can support an organisation that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter”.
Twitter to support open source, officially
Aniszczyk will be delivering a keynote at the foundation’s LinuxCon conference in San Diego this week. In the keynote, he will address why Twitter tends to favour open source software, and how the company tackles problems related to handling large amounts of traffic. “The context of the talk will revolve around what happens behind the scenes when you send a Tweet and will trace the life of a Tweet from our backend to the eventual frontend,” he said in an interview with The Linux Foundation.
The microblogging platform is no stranger to open source technology. It uses MySQL to store its tweet database, and uses other open source tools like Cassandra, Hadoop, Lucene, and Pig within Twitter’s infrastructure to power services such as analytics and search. It develops and has released its own open source tools such as Iago, which is a load generator for testing services before they encounter production traffic; Zipkin, a distributed tracing system for gathering timing data for all the disparate services involved in managing a request to the Twitter API, and a Scala library called Scalding for writing MapReduce jobs in Hadoop by taking advantage of built-in integration with Scala and the JVM.
“Linux powers the majority of Twitter and serves as our technology backbone. We have tens of thousands machines running all types of services that run a customized version of Linux. The reason we prefer Linux is that we are able to innovate faster given the flexibility to customize it based on our needs. We also love the large and mature development community moving the state of the kernel forward,” Aniszczyk said. Twitter is also a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.
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