Google Two Years Into Overhaul of the Google File System

El Reg writes "As its ten-year-old file system — GFS — struggles to keep up with Gmail, YouTube, and other apps it was never designed to support, Google is brewing a replacement. According to the company, it's two years into a GFS sequel designed specifically for customer-facing apps that require ultra low latency."

Comments

hmm

[gnarfel]

Well I'm no expert on Google's internal workings, but are any of these protocols or file systems they've developed been released outside of Google for public use?

Re:hmm

[buchner.johannes]

GFS is proprietary and for internal use only. The only released a paper describing how it works (don't know if that content is enough to rebuild it). I think GFS (global file system) from Redhat and OpenGFS is something differently. Hadoop is what you want. What would we do without the wiki

Re:hmm

[Brian Gordon]

No, they haven't. So why does the editor think we care? "Google Six Months Into Resurfacing Parking Lot"

Re:hmm

[mysidia]

They have not, and apparently Google thinks of the Google FS as part of their secret sauce, such that they will probably never get it released. Although they seem happy to write papers about it.

It's actually really sad... Google has built an innovative platform for distributed computing, that solves quite a few problems, vastly superior to the state of the art in distributed computing, but they basically keep the filesystem and clustering implementations completely to themselves, it would seem.

They use the Linux platform to the absolute max, leveraging all the blood and sweat Linux developers poured into its development over the past 15 years, and yet, not contributing back any of their most significant enhancements.

I won't call it evil, as they're under no obligation to release GoogleFS or their map reduce implementations, it's just unkind.

I would equate it to an inventor creating the lightbulb, and their employer saw this, and decided instead of trying to sell the invention to the public, they decided to only allow their own factories to buy lightbulbs, thus netting them a competitive advantage over other factories whose workers had to operate in the dark or by candlelight.

No software product available to the public that even utilizes GoogleFS. Instead it's all software as a service (The Google search engine service, that is)

Re:hmm

[ToadProphet]

Parent and GP modded funny? Am I missing the joke or are there some giddy drunks with mod points?

Re:hmm

[ksatyr]

"Google Six Months Into Resurfacing Parking Lot"

And it's still in beta.

Re:hmm

[Night Goat]

Yahoo worked fine for me before Google. I think you give it more credit than it deserves. The downside of Yahoo was its advertising and clutter. The searching part worked fine.

Re:hmm

[Snarf You]

While I found both posts informative, I find it funny that they were modded funny. It's meta-funny. You know what else is funny, is that the word funny starts to sound funny after saying it enough times.

Re:hmm

[billcopc]

You clearly weren't an Altavista user.

Google's results today are no better than the leading search engines 10 years ago. People were gaming the engines then, and Google came up with a smarter algorithm (Pagerank), but today's results page is again full of garbage because people learned how to game Pagerank. Combine that with the web 2.0 fad of scraping and regurgitating everyone else's content, and the resultant pile of URLs for any given keyword is utterly worthless. I call it "metapublishing", because the content is worthless, it's become a twisted game of outwitting Google to maximize ad revenue while providing zero value.

Searching has always been a game of finding the most specific yet least popular terms to define what you want, and then adding a bunch of negative keywords to filter out the junk. Google scored a hit, many many years ago, but they haven't been able (or willing) to maintain that lead, and all their competitors have pretty much died out anyway.

If Google hadn't come along when it did, someone else would have stepped up. Maybe Altavista, or Yahoo, or someone else. There was a need, and a provider to address that need. The only reason we don't have a new search engine to beat Google today is because, well, everyone is scared shitless of going head-to-head with Google, except Microsoft with their propaganda-laced Bing embarrassment. They're just not the golden child people seem to think they are.

Re:hmm

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Altavista worked fine, HotBot too. I started using Google primarily because of the cached pages, not because the search was that much better. Plus like you say the Google interface was a breath of fresh air.

Re:hmm

[ToadProphet]

Everyone is in a good mood. Why not :-)

Modded Troll... now that's delicious.

Re:hmm

[negRo_slim]

Plus like you say the Google interface was a breath of fresh air.

Sometimes I wonder if Yahoo hadn't made their default page http://search.yahoo.com/ early on, if they wouldn't have done somewhat better for themselves.

Re:hmm

[NekoYasha]

It's called a " running gag".

Re:hmm

[Afforess]

If you repeat a word too many times, quickly, your brain become tired of that word and it begins to become foreign to it. This event is similar in nature to looking at grid illusions. Your brain becomes tired after a few moments and you see dots.

Re:hmm

[superdave80]

Funny
Funny
Funny
Fun...

Shit, you're right!

Re:hmm

[Afforess]

Why is the OP funny, if it says "40% interesting," "30% funny" and "30% informative"? Shouldn't the post be "Interesting?"

Re:hmm

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

They use the Linux platform to the absolute max, leveraging all the blood and sweat Linux developers poured into its development over the past 15 years, and yet, not contributing back any of their most significant enhancements.

Not contributing back!? Dude, they gave us *google*. Remember what it was like before google? When internet search was basically voo-doo crapshoots, that worked 25% of the time? They gave us a search engine that actually *worked*. Before that, you basically had to bookmark or memorize internet sites that you liked. Good luck actually finding what you were looking for without having an actual site in mind beforehand.

I think that alone has probably spurred the development of free software. Imagine being able to *find things* on the internet!

Are you kidding? Search for Quake? Porn. Search for a new version of Netscape? Porn. Google? PFtb. It always gave me Quake and Netscape. My pr0n searching was MUCH more productive before Google!

Re:hmm

[skine]

Woooooooooooooo!

(Apparently just entering "Woooooooooooooo!" creates an error. I have to explain that it's supposed to be a giddy mod, thus destroying any semblance of assuming intelligence present in at least part of the /. community).

Re:hmm

[Yvan256]

Move closer to your screen. There's plenty of them.

Re:hmm

[HeronBlademaster]

I used Dogpile, back in the day; it would show you the results from ten or so other search engines.

Re:hmm

[BikeHelmet]

Shit, I see dots from the start. My brain must be really lazy.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people think that Google's original claim to fame is PageRank. That's only partially true. Google became as successful as they are because of their systems-scalability work. That is, Google figured out how to build the biggest clusters, with the most storage space, the most computation capacity, and the lowest latency, for the least amount of money (compared to their competitors anyway). If you have 1000x times the computing power of your nearest competitor, then you can do 1000x as much data mining, which means that your search results (and ad relevancy) will be that much better.

For a long time, Google refused to release any information on their system infrastructure (it was their crown jewel, after all). The GFS paper was released in 2003, well after Google had put the filesystem (and its predecessors) to public use.

To sum it up: GFS has been one of the strongest contributing factors to Google's dominance. The idea that Google would voluntarily give this code to competitors is laughable.

Re:hmm

[V!NCENT]

It takes absolutely zero effort for this post to be modded funny

Re:hmm

[D Ninja]

C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

Google is IT done right...

[Alien Being]

but God help us all if they ever do turn evil.

Re:Google is IT done right...

[Nefarious Wheel]

Developers aren't IT?

Not really, no. It's kind of like the difference between a doctor and a patient. Or to use a car analogy, the difference between being an automotive engineer and the guy who takes money for candy bars, magazines and fuel.

Disclosure: I was a developer for about thirty years before I took a step down and moved into marketing. I learned a lot of languages but was stopped when I discovered I was having trouble mastering Hindi.

Re:It's not really GFS

[mysidia]

That is a problem that may be getting corrected by the IANA TLA registry :)

Quality of comments going downhill...

[s0litaire]

There's over 25 comments and not one has attempted to call it "Goatse File System"!

Whats up with you trolls! You guys on a union break or what!!

Where's meta-moderation when you need it?

[nobodyman]

I'm impressed that all of these Reddit users had the attention span to stay long enough to get mod points. But nobody likes a guest who overstays their welcome. Besides, I think somebody posted an animated gif of an old man falling down or something. GO CHECK IT OUT!!!1!1one