Spouting Shite

What would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?

I had a pint with two friends last week and they asked me why I was so excited about cloud computing. I was amazed about the question…why wouldn’t you? I told them my “slash dot” story….butI should have told them the story about Christophe Bisciglia.

Bisciglia is a software developer at Google. He used to test the overly confident job applicants to see if these undergrads were ready to think like Googlers. He would ask them detailed questions about their college projects, how they were structured, planned, implemented and supported. Then he would hit them with the clincher….What would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?

Most people cant answer that question. Bisciglia would then explain that to thrive at Google they would have to learn to work—and to dream—on a vastly larger scale. There is only one answer to his question and that is cloud computing.

What is cloud computing? In the Google incarnation it is a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers. The cloud 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.

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it’s the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.