Owl - Scale and Flexibility in Distribution of Hot Content

Explore a conference talk on Owl, a high-fanout distribution system for large data objects in Meta's private cloud. Learn how Owl combines a decentralized data plane using ephemeral peer-to-peer distribution trees with a centralized control plane for managing metadata and optimizing distribution. Discover how this innovative approach improves download speeds by 2-3 times compared to BitTorrent and previous static distribution trees. Understand the system's ability to handle over 800 petabytes of data daily, serving millions of client processes across 106 use cases with 55 different distribution policies. Gain insights into Owl's flexible policy interface, tracker sharding techniques, and the benefits of centralizing the control plane for scalability and customization.