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Peeking Into Google

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One part I loved about the article is:

"All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel…."

"The downside to cheap machines is, you have to make them work together reliably," Hoelzle said. "These things are cheap and easy to put together. The problem is, these things break."

 

Sometimes it's hard to explain to people why not to write everything from scratch and use things like EnterpriseServices or subsystems of OS's, this is a good example, while it the linux code they use maybe simple it's not so obvious to control it and get sophisticated scenarios with not cost.

That is why I believe Windows is so popular, it has services like Application Pooling in IIS and EnterpriseServices which are hard to implement.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2005
    Sorry - You missed the point. It's the HARDWARE that is cheap. Cheap hardware fails more often, and therefore needs a good OS and Application-services to appear reliable. Linux obviously provides the OS part.

    Application Pooling doesn't help much when the hardware breaks. :-)
  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2005
    I don't agree, while the hardware is cheap it doesn't mean it's not reliable, the software part of it is to make it simple to do complex scenarios.

    It's obvious that a software can't help when you have faulty hardware but I don't believe this is the case here.
  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2005
    Even though it's in regard to hardware, it's a known fact that cheap (cost and quality) operating systems, like the complete joke known as Linux, can be the single most expensive of all.

    Fortunately, Microsoft provided us a system to which there need be no alternatives: Windows.
  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2005
    From the article: "In fact, at Google, many will fail every day. So, Google has automated methods of dealing with machine failures, allowing it to build a fast, highly reliable service with cheap hardware"

    This is all about hardware. - How to minimize problems with cheap hardware. (No raid, no dual networking, no dual whatever.)

    I also thing it's nice to have a good foundation when bulding (software)services, but this was not the issue brought up in the article.
  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2009
    PingBack from http://insomniacuresite.info/story.php?id=1883