Inside the Google-Plex

tappytibbins writes "Baseline magazine has an in-depth story about how Google manages its own IT infrastructure. From the article: 'In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting.'"

A Google Lecture Experience

[A Dafa Disciple]

Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting

An alum of my university who works at Google recently visited and gave an informative lecture with a long Q&A session. I can vouch for the fact that we were told more than I've ever been able to read online about the way Google manages various issues, like their IT infrastucture. However there were still limitations to what he would/could tell us (sorry I won't go into specifics). It seemed (as you would expect) the better our questions, the better his answers, and if we asked questions that were too good, then it was likely that he did not feel liberated to answer.

Also, Google was cool enough to sponsor a Programming Contest and a Graduate Research Conference we held. Our alum attended our little conference and had great feedback and questions for our presenting students. With respect to knowledge, intelligence, and humor this guy was all I would imagine and/or hope for one of our alums working at Google.

On the otherhand, I was very unimpressed with certain issues concerning lack of professionalism in the lecture. As one example, though this is only an impression, it seemed that he felt he could just get away with wearing jeans and a Google t-shirt for the few days that he was with us because he worked at the ever prestigious Google. It seemed a bit arrogant. Also keep in mind that his position at google is higher than a solutions engineer.

Just thought I'd share.

I once had an interest in Google

[drewzhrodague]

I was interested in working for Google -- mostly for a job. I even had someone from inside recommend me -- I figured I'd be in, no problem. Rather than being interviewed for my skills, or the relevant department, they interviewed me for a sysadmin. No problem, I'm a sysadmin I thought. I didn't do the CS route at a university, though, and there were some highly relevant things that I just didn't know how to answer. I didn't pass round two.

So I tried to get another interview for a while, but no bites. Google has made it clear that they aren't interested in my work. I've stopped trying to get a job there. Besides, I don't think I can sit in a cube and take long drudgery with the occasional stinging bits of punnishment. I like all my punnishment unending and all at once, and so I just work for startups.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Little in the way of structuring data

[leandrod]

Everyone is talking about GoogleFS. But no one is talking about how they manage structured data. How do they do it? Some SQL stuff, some homegrow potion, or have they managed to create a sensible interface for structured data on top of GoogleFS?

go to the source

[adpowers]

Here are some good papers [google.com] about Google's technologies:
Sawzall [google.com] (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce)
MapReduce [google.com] (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.)
GFS [google.com] (Google's File System)
Google's Cluster [google.com] (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)
BigTable [andrewhitchcock.org] (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)

And here are some videos:
The Google Linux Cluster [washington.edu]. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things.
Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look [washington.edu]. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny).
Perspectives on the Information Industry [washington.edu]. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt.
BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System [washington.edu]. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).

Andrew

Re:Sysasmin(S)

[adpowers]

I'm sure they need more than that. Google representatives often say (when talking about cheap commodity hardware), "With 1000 machines, you can expect one to fail everyday." Therefore, if they have 450,000 machines, you can expect about 450 to fail a day. Not only that, but they are probably adding machines like crazy and replacing old machines as they become cost-inefficient (the numbers I've heard say they keep computers for 2-3 years). I think it would take more than two guys to do all that. I'm sure they have a huge ratio of computers to sysadmins, but they still need a bunch of folks to replace the dead machines and add new ones. I imagine their servers are easy to manage on the software side, however.

Re:A Google Lecture Experience

[Nefarious Wheel]

A few decades ago in a small service bureau near LAX a visiting suit-and-tie type walked past and took exception to the engineer who was dressed in shirt and jeans and busily filing down a resistor on a logic card. Seems he wanted the miscreant fired/evicted for (a) not representing CDC to the public correctly, (b) obviously damaging a very rare and expensive piece of equipment, and (c) ignoring him. "That's Seymour," said the DC manager, "and I don't think you can fire him. And if he's filing down a resistor, I presume the computer will work better that way".

Please accept the above for the lovely second-hand urban myth that it is, one belonging to a CDC 6600 site where I was lucky enough to attend a few lectures.

Re:Sysasmin(S)

[petermgreen]

i seem to remember reading they don't replace the failed ones, they just junk the entire rack when it becomes not worth running anymore.

i'm guessing google are big enough to have thier own datacenters and thus not have space at such a premium as smaller operations. If space isn't at a premium replacing a machine in a rack probablly isn't worth it (it means you have a machine whose remaining usefull life is out of sync with the rest of the rack its in).

Re:Also...

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy jumping Jehosephat. When on earth is this ridiculous google spoogefest going to end? He was addressing CIOs? Yeah? Well, that explains why I now hear on an alomst daily basis 'just make it like Google', whether it be search, infrastructure, or personnel. Let's see what it would actually mean to 'make it like Google'.

1. Isn't PageRank based on a voting system? OK, in an intranet full of PDFs and Word docs, who votes? Yup, that's right, PageRank doesn't work in an enterprise context.
2. Infrastructure. Thousands of cheap servers. Great, right? Until you have to actually synchronize written data, rather than the read-only nature of 99+% of Google's data. Come to think of it, why do they need that many? Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, and everyone else index the web with far fewer I'll bet. Oh, and no in an enterprise it's not cool to give different results to different users at the same time, something Google does with alacrity.
3. Personnel. Don't get me started. 5,000 PhDs and their efforts to combat Click Fraud amount to -erm- not a whole hill o'beans [digg.com].

Re:On the other hand...

[Skreems]

That's an interesting point. I think a lot of companies are actually that way. I work for *undisclosed faceless corporation* and people show up here in shorts and birkenstocks. A guy on our team walks around the offices barefoot. Invader Zim posters, figurines, calendars of cheerleaders, etc. are all over the place. You could show up in flip flops if you wanted to... but people choose not to. There's something about that Google mentality that sounds neat at first, but then you realize that you're not in college anymore, and even though you CAN wear flip flops to work, you probably don't want to.

So is it neat to have a trendy office space? Sure. Is it neat to have communal centres scattered around the building, and be encouraged to stay afterhours to play games? I guess. But it's the kind of thing that gets old once you realize you've got a family and a life outside of work. Working for Google sounds like working in a basement with a bunch of friends, but that only really works if you don't have other things you want to be devoting time to. Once their workforce matures a bit, I'd guess their "kooky, trippy workspace" won't work quite so well. Don't forget, they're still basically a glorified startup. I'm sure Microsoft had a lot of the same feel back in '86.

My Google Recruitment experience

[The Ape With No Name]

I went through the majority of the process (phone interviews, then the face time at the New York facility and a trip to California) before I told them I wasn't interested in the job. My reasons for turning them down were three. First, the 80/20 deal was a myth if you were going to pursue something they were really interested in. I wanted to complete my PhD. Now, this PhD was not in a field they cared much about (despite their glaring need of my skills for one particular service), so that part of the deal was mumbled everytime it was mention. Second, the pay wasn't good enough to basically live at the facility. Third, the interview process was abusive in many respects. The first phone call was with a guy consumed by asking me about my doctoral research and my knowledge of how inodes work. He kept shifting between the two. When I asked him why this was even necessary given the position I was applying for, he got irritated and said that you had to know the ins-and-outs of how a file system works in order to configure (something I wouldn't be doing) any part of their infrastructure.

This lead to my observation of part of their file storage system which is quite possibly the most tweaked NFS nightmare/genius/what-the-fuck I'd ever seen. My past experience with networked file system was, I admit, very limited compared to what they had going on. Now, again, I wasn't even going to have anything to do with this system or any sysadmin work at all, but it was obvious that they wanted you to at least have knowledge of the system on some level beyond the user. It also came across as a showing-off culture too. I am glad I didn't take the job for various reasons, but if you are a sysadmin freaker who loves dinking with shit, you'd fit in; especially if you like to show it off too. Just be prepared to have some middle manager there fuck with you for a hour or two on the phone before you get to the outer part of the inner sanctum.

professional presentation for interview

[gotih]

i base my personal presentation for interviews on my experience in 1997 when i was 19 and got an interview with a waaay old school fortune 500 company. figuring that if i showed up in my dressiest clothes i would be expected to continue to dress that way, i showed up wearing the best clothes i could feel comfortable in -- jeans, a short sleeved tennis shirt and my always-on black zip-up hoodie over top. the interview was conducted by four people, one manager in a suit, two workers in business casual, and the most tech-knowledgeable in jeans and t-shirt. despite appearances, my professional demeanor and relevant knowledge convinced them that i was capable. i was later told my dress told them that i wasn't trying to hide anything. i got the job.