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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.'"
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.
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.
It's been my experience that the companies who worried most about what their IT staff was wearing were the worst to work for.
Aha! He has revealed that the Google-plex contains a 'door.'
This slip of the mind will prove invaluable in my Google-imitation plots.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
In other news, Google has started tagging new employees on probation with 'BETA' labels.
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
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.
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
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.