Imagine yourself in the role of CIO at Roblox in 2017.
By that time, the gaming platform and publishing system launched in 2005 was growing rapidly, but its core technology was aging, consisting of a single data center in Chicago and a group of third-party partners, including AWS, all running bare metal (non-virtualized servers). At a time when users have precious little patience for outages, uptime was only two nines or less than 99% (five nines is considered optimal).
Incredibly, Roblox it was popular despite this, but the company's leadership knew it couldn't keep up with such performance, especially as it was rapidly gaining popularity. The company needed to call the tech cavalry, which is essentially what it did when it hired Dan Williams in 2017.
Williams has a history of solving these kinds of intractable infrastructure problems, with a background that includes a concert at Facebook between 2007 and 2011, where he worked on technology to help young social networks reach millions of users. Next, he worked at Dropbox, where he helped build a new internal network, leading the company's relocation from AWS, a major undertaking that involves moving more than 500 petabytes of data.
When Roblox approached him in mid-2017, he jumped at the opportunity to tackle another major infrastructure challenge. While still in the midst of transitioning to a new modern technology stack today, we sat down with Williams to learn how he led the company on the road to a cloud-native, microservices-focused system with its own global edge network Data centers. .
