Must-read book from the Google infrastructure team
Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle from Google’s infrastructure team have just published a fascinating book, “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines”. It’s brief – a 120-page PDF download – but comprehensive:
As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC).
So instead of thinking about the data center as a service, which everybody has been doing under the headings of “cloud” and “IaaS”, the authors want to focus on the data center as an integrated system. From “the network is the computer” to “the data center is the computer”. I like it. James Hamilton has more here.
