Recently, Google Fellow Jeff Dean gave a presentation at the LADIS 2009 (Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware) Conference. As with some of his previous talks, this one did an excellent job of revealing a bit more about how Google builds systems and what they’ve learned in doing so.
Working at the scale they do (thousands and thousands of servers) is especially interesting because you have to really step back and change your thinking about the available building blocks and how they can best fit together to get the job done. And to do so it helps to have a good high level mental model of the pieces and their performance. In Google’s case, this means having 40-80 servers (4-8 cores, 16GB RAM, 2TB disk) in a rack all connected via a gigabit ethernet switch. Multiple (30+) racks then uplink to a another switch to form a cluster. And services are designed to run across multiple clusters in different data centers around the world...
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Linux Kernel Development How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It: An August 2009 Update