What does it take to make Google work at scale?
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What does it take to make Google work at scale?
1–10 of 134 posts
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#2Kind of ironic: "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears"
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#3Kind of ironic: "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears"
Incidentally, that's part of scalability: knowing when you can drop functionality and the user won't care. For Google Docs, it's highly unlikely that a file with 1000s of viewers is actively being edited by 1000s of users, and more likely the link just got shared on the Internet. So you can drop edit functionality for everyone but the original author and they won't care.
Another example - one that I've heard second-hand - is how Facebook gets consistency on the news feed. Apparently your own writes to Facebook are sent separately to a write-aside cache, and then the webserver merges them back in whenever you view a page. As a result, Facebook is always strongly-consistent when it comes to your comments (you'll never post something and then fail to see it show up), but it's only eventually-consistent with respect to other peoples' comments. But then, you won't know about or care about the latter, because how would you know that you're not seeing something they posted?
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#4"NTP isn't accurate enough so we use a hardware clock assist that uses GPS and atomic clocks" - Google
I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale.
Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away, just like the recent conversations about working at Amazon, but crazy stuff like this always piques my interest.
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#5Kind of ironic: "Wow, this file is really popular! Some tools might be unavailable until the crowd clears"
No. It would be ironic is if it stopped working at all with no notification.
As it is they are just demonstrating competence at scaling.
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#6"NTP isn't accurate enough so we use a hardware clock assist that uses GPS and atomic clocks" - Google I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away, just like the recent conversations about working at Amazon, but crazy stuff like this always piques my interest.
I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale.
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#7"NTP isn't accurate enough so we use a hardware clock assist that uses GPS and atomic clocks" - Google I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away, just like the recent conversations about working at Amazon, but crazy stuff like this always piques my interest.
I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Time keeping is one of the things that is most often underestimated and screwed up at any scale, in my experience. Many a subtle bug turns out to be a poor assumption or misunderstanding about how clocks work. Or calendars.
i.e. A lot of distributed systems problems can be simplified if you can trust your clocks.
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#8"NTP isn't accurate enough so we use a hardware clock assist that uses GPS and atomic clocks" - Google I think it is crazy that something as simple as keeping time can have such a complicated solution at that sort of scale. Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away, just like the recent conversations about working at Amazon, but crazy stuff like this always piques my interest.
"Every review I hear about working at Google makes me want to stay away"
I loved working there. Sure, who your boss is has a huge impact on your happiness. I ended up with a boss I enjoyed working for.
Does that review make you want to stay away, too?
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#9[deleted]
Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?
#10I understood some of these terms.