Re Haystack: possible I am misremembering, or the project to completely replace Haystack stalled since I left.
If you want to gather a more complete picture of infrastructure at these companies I suggest, well, not imposing the strange limitation of only reading peer-reviewed papers. Almost none of the stuff I worked on ended up in conference proceedings.
Regarding the focus on academic papers: I agree that this does not reflect the entirety of what goes on inside companies (or indeed how open they are; FB and Google also release lots of open-source software). Certainly, only reading the papers would be a bad idea. However, a peer-reviewed paper (unlike, say, a blog post) is a permanent, citable reference and is part of the scientific literature. This sets a quality bar (enforced through peer review, which deemed the description to be plausible and accurate), and allows the amount of information to remain manageable. The number of other sources of information makes them impractical to write up concisely, and it is hard to say what ought to be included and what should not when going beyond published papers.
I don't think anyone should base their perception of how Google's or Facebook's stack works on these charts and bibliographies -- not least because they will quickly be out of date. However, I personally find them useful as a quick reference to comprehensive, high-quality descriptions of systems that are regularly mentioned in discussions :-)
This link has papers on pub/sub, HHVM, and so on: https://research.facebook.com/publications/
Re Haystack: possible I am misremembering, or the project to completely replace Haystack stalled since I left.
If you want to gather a more complete picture of infrastructure at these companies I suggest, well, not imposing the strange limitation of only reading peer-reviewed papers. Almost none of the stuff I worked on ended up in conference proceedings.