The Social Network™ has spent years trying to hop from MySQL 5.6 to 8.0 and still isn’t done
Facebook has had all sorts of no fun trying to migrate from MySQL 5.6 to version 8.0. A post from the social network’s engineering team reveals that Facebook’s last MySQL upgrade – to version 5.6 – took “more than a year”. Moving to version 8.0 has taken “a few years so far”. Some of the reasons for the slow rollout will sound familiar – such as continued work on legacy software, even as new infrastructure was being implemented. Facebook had custom code – over 1700 patches in its in-house branch of MySQL 5.6. Even as it ported them to 8.0, the company was adding more custom features to version 5.6 that also needed to be dragged into the future. Other parts of Facebook legacy code wouldn’t work with MySQL 8.0, and therefore “required a deprecation and migration path forward”. “Upgrading from 5.6 to 8.0 skipped over 5.7 entirely. APIs that were active in 5.6 would have been deprecated in 5.7 and possibly removed in 8.0, requiring us to update any application using the now-removed APIs,” wrote Facebook software engineer Herman Lee and production engineering manager Pradeep Nayak.
