Tulip: Modernizing Meta’s data platform

This post details the engineering, scaling, and non-technical challenges of migrating Meta's exabyte-scale data platform to the new Tulip serialization format for analytics logging. It describes the motivation for the migration, driven by reliability and efficiency issues with legacy (de)serialization formats. Key technical solutions include a mixed-mode wire format to support gradual migration, a 'Reader' library to abstract serialization from consumers, and format conversion in consumers for infeasible updates. Debugging tools like 'loggertail' and 'shadow loggers' were developed for validation and end-to-end testing. The migration was executed in two phases: planning/preparation/experimentation and scaling, with a focus on tooling, automation, and managing non-technical aspects.