Back from the Holidays and ready to post again (!).....the December 13th, 2007 issue of Business Week showed up in my mailbox and is one of the few issues that I immediately sat down to read. The cover story for this issue was "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds". Its your typical mainstream press peek into the inner workings of Google by a non-techie type and documents discussions with senior software engineer Chris Bisciglia who is championing the idea of cloud computing at the company. What is the "wisdom of the clouds" you may ask? To quote directly from the article:
"It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing." (Business Week Dec. 13, 2007 "Google and the Wisdom of Clouds")
Google's brand and reputation were built on exceptional technology and vision through an enormous grid computing structure. The Google grid - aka the cloud - is what makes Google so fast in crunching enormous amounts of data. What piques my attention though is the last sentence where Google's system is described as almost like a living entity - The "cloud regenerates as it grows". Fascinating. Now that relies on human intervention to constantly upgrade so its not so bad. It gets more sci-fi further on when the article says:
"...Google keeps much under cover. This immense computer, after all, runs the company. It automatically handles search, places ads, churns through e-mails. The computer does the work, and thousands of Google engineers, including Bisciglia, merely service the machine."
Google PhD engineers with super expensive degrees and massive brain power and all they do is "merely service the machine"? So is Google a computer run by people or is Google people run by a computer? Was the Matrix filmed in Mountain View, CA by chance?
Now obviously Google is pursuing cloud computing technology as a way to deliver superior service to its users. But where does this go and why? The article answers that question too:
"It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM, announced in October 2007, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds. As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer."
This blog is about innovation and the future of web technology. I can't think of anything more important to watch over the next 5-10 years than this!
