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Ex-Google Engineer Blasts Google's Technology
lee1 writes "Dhanji R. Prasanna, an engineer who recently resigned from Google, describes Google's famous back-end infrastructure as a collection of obsolete technologies, designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers. He blasts MapReduce and its closed-source friends as 'ancient, creaking dinosaurs', compared with outside open source projects like MessagePack, JSON, and Hadoop. He also criticizes Google's coding culture, which has become unfriendly to hacker types due to the company's enormous size." I suspect that most people would be happy to have company infrastructure problems as pressing as Google's, though.
This guy seems to have never lost his academic mindset, it's not at all surprising, or bad really, that Google is keeping around old technology. Guess what, they have this thing called operations where they pretty much have to be up 24x7 so that they can serve customer requests. They cannot just start dumping infrastructure that:
a) work and
b) they have invested significant amounts of money in
just because some new technology came around. If everybody in industry did that, it would be absolute chaos and nobody would be able to get anything done. This is just as true in computers as it is with steel mills.
Now compare this with academia, where they have no real customer base to speak of. They can constantly push the boundaries, try new technologies, change their infrastructure etc. That seems to be where this guys mindset remains.
Note that I'm not bashing academia as being out of touch with "reality" or anything like that, the entire POINT of academia is to push these boundaries, industry exists to take these advances, combine them with their own, and then deploy them in an operationally efficient manner.
Monstar L
10 year old tech? My last job was using a bunch of stuff originally built in the 1970s! This guy needs to get a grip on reality. You don't throw out something that works, even if it's a bit kludgey sometimes, simply because there's some fancy new thing.