

Behind the Scenes of Google Scalability - breily
http://highscalability.com/behind-scenes-google-scalability

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apathy
holy fucking shit. The fridge rack we installed in the Herndon datacenter is
there, large as life, in one of the slides, with the entire (circa 2003) hwops
team's signatures on it. I have trouble believing that it was in fact the
optimal rack design (given the cooling and power that GOOG favors) but I guess
if it ain't broke, and has several patents on the genius features that make it
easy to service, why 'fix' it...

The 'never seen a petabyte of data, never used a thousand machines' slide was
funny. I'm not a particularly strong CS guy, but I happened to work on
molecular dynamics right after getting my undergraduate degree in chemistry,
and can note for the record that I got allocated 1000 CPUs during a test
deployment... which we promptly soaked. Whether the exercise was a useful one
is hard to say.

But the genius of Google (and Amazon) is that now it doesn't matter. You just
have to find the right model for your code so that it harnesses an arbitrary
number of unreliable nodes, and the libraries (and infrastructure) do the
rest. It's really amazing how far things have come in 10 years.

