shahine.com/omar/

Cool, our Kahuna Channel 9 video is posted! With that, our beta users should be getting fresh code tomorrow with a number of cool features we demoed in the video.

A number of folks in the Hotmail org participated in this video.

• Imran (PM on the Mail User Experience & Safety)
• Pablo (Lead PM on the Backed team and Human Spam Filter)
• Aditya (PM on my team)
• Reeves (Lead PM on the UX Team)
• Walter (Dev Lead for Kahuna and architect of FireAnt)
• Me (Lead PM on the Infrastructure/Architecture)

Also, there is some great new info out there on Kahuna. Walter recently gave a talk at the PDC and you can get his slides here.

Aditya also posted some of the stats on Hotmail from Walter’s talk:

• ~200 million active users
• 3.3 billion inbound emails a day
  • 1.5 billion blocked at the router
  • 1.0 billion deleted as spam (never hits the user's mailbox)
  • 0.5 billion sent to the junk folder
• Over 100 million messages sent a day
• 80 - 100 million logins per day
• 5000 peak logins per second

I still find these numbers humbling. Last year when I visited our data center I got a sense of exactly what this looks like, and words can't describe it.

Of course, our secret weapon in developing Kahuna has been the creation of what we refer to as the STaR team (It stands for something but I forget). Basically, this is a dedicated set of folks who deal with the current live site (the code that everyone except the beta users are on). They allow us to do our jobs w/o losing focus on the challenge at hand (getting Kahuna to have the features our users want, and building it to scale).

As we make progress on our development I hope to post more about what it’s like building a service to scale.