Taming Hybrid-Cloud Fast and Scalable Graph Analytics at Twitter

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified, scalable, and efficient graph analytics platform at Twitter that handles diverse large-scale graph workloads across hybrid cloud environments, improving analytics speed and reliability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unified platform for large-scale graph analytics at Twitter, addressing scalability, efficiency, and hybrid cloud deployment challenges.

Findings

Achieved significant speedups in graph analytics tasks.

Validated platform performance with real Twitter use cases.

Demonstrated scalability across various graph sizes.

Abstract

We have witnessed a boosted demand for graph analytics at Twitter in recent years, and graph analytics has become one of the key parts of Twitter's large-scale data analytics and machine learning for driving engagement, serving the most relevant content, and promoting healthier conversations. However, infrastructure for graph analytics has historically not been an area of investment at Twitter, resulting in a long timeline and huge engineering effort for each project to deal with graphs at the Twitter scale. How do we build a unified graph analytics user experience to fulfill modern data analytics on various graph scales spanning from thousands to hundreds of billions of vertices and edges? To bring fast and scalable graph analytics capability into production, we investigate the challenges we are facing in large-scale graph analytics at Twitter and propose a unified graph analytics platform for efficient, scalable, and reliable graph analytics across on-premises and cloud, to fulfill the requirements of diverse graph use cases and challenging scales. We also conduct quantitative benchmarking on Twitter's production-level graph use cases between popular graph analytics frameworks to certify our solution.