Inside the Google-Plex

tappytibbins writes "Baseline magazine has an in-depth story about how Google manages its own IT infrastructure. From the article: 'In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting.'"

Comments

print friendly version

[Anonymous Coward]

print friendly version, because their page layout is a little too far on the "hey, if we add more adverts, we'll make more money!!1!"/WiReD-more-colors-are-good end of the scale.

Forget the googleplex

[eclectro]

I want inside the google party plane!!

That makes perfect sense

[Flavio]

Most journalists and business analysts are notable for doing a half-assed job and taking credit for cut & paste jobs. Journalists who actually spend time researching their stories are a dying breed, so my take on this is that Google would rather not waste their time answering stupid questions from people who don't even understand what they're publishing. Their time is much better spent recruiting smart people or just talking to grad students in some sort of academic goodwill.

A Google Lecture Experience

[A Dafa Disciple]

Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting

An alum of my university who works at Google recently visited and gave an informative lecture with a long Q&A session. I can vouch for the fact that we were told more than I've ever been able to read online about the way Google manages various issues, like their IT infrastucture. However there were still limitations to what he would/could tell us (sorry I won't go into specifics). It seemed (as you would expect) the better our questions, the better his answers, and if we asked questions that were too good, then it was likely that he did not feel liberated to answer.

Also, Google was cool enough to sponsor a Programming Contest and a Graduate Research Conference we held. Our alum attended our little conference and had great feedback and questions for our presenting students. With respect to knowledge, intelligence, and humor this guy was all I would imagine and/or hope for one of our alums working at Google.

On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant. Also keep in mind that his position at google is higher than a solutions engineer.

Just thought I'd share.

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[SoCalChris]

On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant.

Why does he have to wear anything more than jeans & a Google shirt? A computer guy in a shirt & tie is not a happy computer guy.

It's been my experience that the companies who worried most about what their IT staff was wearing were the worst to work for.

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[Dun Malg]

On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant.

Shock. Horror. The man was dressed comfortably in clean, casual clothes. That's your only complaint? Where are you from, Victorian England? Come join the rest of us in the 21st century. Arrogant? Arrogance would be whipping his thingy out and pissing on the front row. For casual dress to be arrogance it would be necessary for him to believe that a suit and tie is the only appropriate dress for such an occasion, and then intentionally not wear them as an insult. I doubt this was the case. Sounds to me more like the problem's with you and your slavish adherence to an increasingly outdated dress code.

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[MoonBuggy]

Fair point, but perhaps people who equate clothes with professionalism (not accusing you, and it is true that we all make judgements on appearance to some degree, but anyway...) have been deemed as people who they do not feel the need to impress. If I owned a business I would certainly be inclined to think that way - maybe that's a reason that I wouldn't succeed in owning a business, but it appears that Google makes as much money as they could ever need; if they don't become too greedy they can afford to interact with the world on their own terms rather than those decided by a particular portion of society.

In essence, I see the jeans and a T-shirt as a positive representation of the company, it represents a company in which essentially arbitrary rules are examined for their usefulness and if neccessary discarded.

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[Phishcast]

Perhaps "arrogant" wasn't the right word for the poster to use, but I can see where he's coming from with this. If you're presenting at a prestigious institution (or one that considers itself such) you should show a little respect for that institution by dressing it up a bit. A tie wouldn't be necessary, but ditching the jeans and wearing a button up shirt (or a polo shirt even) seems like it would be in order.

I'm a computer guy, I wear jeans to work every day, and I'm happy that way. If I'm being asked to speak in front of a large group of people I don't grab something out of the hamper, y'know?

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[Nefarious Wheel]

A few decades ago in a small service bureau near LAX a visiting suit-and-tie type walked past and took exception to the engineer who was dressed in shirt and jeans and busily filing down a resistor on a logic card. Seems he wanted the miscreant fired/evicted for (a) not representing CDC to the public correctly, (b) obviously damaging a very rare and expensive piece of equipment, and (c) ignoring him. "That's Seymour," said the DC manager, "and I don't think you can fire him. And if he's filing down a resistor, I presume the computer will work better that way".

Please accept the above for the lovely second-hand urban myth that it is, one belonging to a CDC 6600 site where I was lucky enough to attend a few lectures.

Re:NDA time?

[Kesch]

Aha! He has revealed that the Google-plex contains a 'door.'

This slip of the mind will prove invaluable in my Google-imitation plots.

In other news

[Van Cutter Romney]

In other news, Google has started tagging new employees on probation with 'BETA' labels.

go to the source

[adpowers]

Here are some good papers about Google's technologies:
Sawzall (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce)
MapReduce (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.)
GFS (Google's File System)
Google's Cluster (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)
BigTable (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)

And here are some videos:
The Google Linux Cluster. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things.
Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny).
Perspectives on the Information Industry. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt.
BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).

Andrew

Re:Sysasmin(S)

[petermgreen]

i seem to remember reading they don't replace the failed ones, they just junk the entire rack when it becomes not worth running anymore.

i'm guessing google are big enough to have thier own datacenters and thus not have space at such a premium as smaller operations. If space isn't at a premium replacing a machine in a rack probablly isn't worth it (it means you have a machine whose remaining usefull life is out of sync with the rest of the rack its in).

Re:Also...

[The Cydonian]

Isn't PageRank based on a voting system? OK, in an intranet full of PDFs and Word docs, who votes? Yup, that's right, PageRank doesn't work in an enterprise context.

I think it is fairly obvious that Google does not use PageRank for some of its specialized searches, such as for gmail, Google video and so on; they simply use some text-matching algorithm in those apps. Not that hard to imagine that this would be the case with Google Enterprise (or whatever they call their app).

Come to think of it, why do they need that many? Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, and everyone else index the web with far fewer I'll bet

Unless you're trolling, (or think Google should be a search engine alone), you would know that Google does a lot more than plain-vanilla web search.

Don't get me started. 5,000 PhDs and their efforts to combat Click Fraud amount to -erm- not a whole hill o'beans.

Try reading that ZDNet article, instead of forming opinions just by looking at headlines.

My Google Recruitment experience

[The Ape With No Name]

I went through the majority of the process (phone interviews, then the face time at the New York facility and a trip to California) before I told them I wasn't interested in the job. My reasons for turning them down were three. First, the 80/20 deal was a myth if you were going to pursue something they were really interested in. I wanted to complete my PhD. Now, this PhD was not in a field they cared much about (despite their glaring need of my skills for one particular service), so that part of the deal was mumbled everytime it was mention. Second, the pay wasn't good enough to basically live at the facility. Third, the interview process was abusive in many respects. The first phone call was with a guy consumed by asking me about my doctoral research and my knowledge of how inodes work. He kept shifting between the two. When I asked him why this was even necessary given the position I was applying for, he got irritated and said that you had to know the ins-and-outs of how a file system works in order to configure (something I wouldn't be doing) any part of their infrastructure.

This lead to my observation of part of their file storage system which is quite possibly the most tweaked NFS nightmare/genius/what-the-fuck I'd ever seen. My past experience with networked file system was, I admit, very limited compared to what they had going on. Now, again, I wasn't even going to have anything to do with this system or any sysadmin work at all, but it was obvious that they wanted you to at least have knowledge of the system on some level beyond the user. It also came across as a showing-off culture too. I am glad I didn't take the job for various reasons, but if you are a sysadmin freaker who loves dinking with shit, you'd fit in; especially if you like to show it off too. Just be prepared to have some middle manager there fuck with you for a hour or two on the phone before you get to the outer part of the inner sanctum.