Facebook has invited reporters to a "behind the scenes" look at the company's headquarters next week,.
The subject of the Thursday briefing will be "a behind-the-scenes look at the latest technology powering Facebook," according to an invitation sent to reporters on Friday.
The event will be held at the company's existing headquarters in Palo Alto, and not the company's new headquarters in Palo Alto that Facebook recently announced.
The subject of the invitation implies an IT-focused conference, whether it be the network of servers Facebook uses to power its archive of user's photos and other personal information that's stored in the cloud. The company could also provide more information for developers who wish to tap into the company's social-graph APIs to integrate their products more closely with Facebook.
A Facebook executive recently offered just this sort of behind-the-scenes look at the technology it uses, with its "Chinese foot-soldier" Web server strategy.
Gio Coglitore, director of Facebook Labs, spoke at an Intel event in San Francisco recently, where Intel announced plans for a sub-10-watt Atom server processor in 2012.
As the fourth-largest site within the United States, with more than 153 million visitors as estimated by comScore, how the company deploys its server architecture is obviously extremely important. Coglitore also said that Facebook believes in "testing in production," adding test machines to a live network.
"If you ever experience a glitch [while using the site], it might be Gio testing something out," Coglitore said.
Facebook has a rather substantial back-end database that enjoys a certain category of processors, and a front-facing infrastructure and memory cache that uses a bunch of Web servers, Coglitore said. It's in this front- or user-facing environment that Facebook will use the microservers, he said.