Just ran across a very good post by Robin Harris from the misty dawn of time (last summer) stemming from the Google Scalability conference. Why should we care how Google scales? Like Robin points out,
They roll out new applications for millions of users with surprising speed, especially compared to corporate IT. They build data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers – and millions of disk drives – and run it all on free software.
Costly corporate kit, like RAID arrays and 15k FC drives, aren’t used. Yet they do more work in an hour than most companies do in a year.
Google’s IT capabilities are a modern wonder of the world. Underneath the complexity though are just three simple rules. Rules that no enterprise data center (EDC) would ever think of following.
What are Google’s three rules?
- Cheap (use commodity everywhere)
- Embrace failure
- Architect for scale
It is very interesting to consider how these three principles interact. For example, admitting that stuff breaks and making sure that that isn’t a problem takes care of a big concern about using commodity equipment. So does "architecting for scale", which takes care of another concern about using commodity gear – can I solve big enough problems?
In any case, what is the net effect for Google? Continuing with Robin’s post:
This is more than first-mover advantage. The faster they can grow, the greater their cost advantage over smaller, less nimble competitors. Their ROI brings them cheap capital, which increases their ability to invest in new businesses and more capacity. The higher their volumes, the cheaper growth becomes. A perfect storm.
All of this work is done by hordes of very smart folks at Google. Yet with all of the advantages, there are many limitations. There are well-known reliability problems, as well as complicated operations. Harris also points out that
Google’s purpose-built infrastructure is also relatively inflexible: they can’t just paste on (acid) transaction processing.
That’s where application fabrics come in. To this potent set of rules we add one or two of our own, absolutely necessary to make commoditization practical for the enterprise. What are the additional rules?
Check back soon to find out … in the meantime, you might want to check out some earlier posts like this one and that one.
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