Google Compute Engine

Preface

Today’s most advanced computing technology exists in large buildings containing vast arrays of low-cost servers. Enormous computing resources are housed in well-fortified, secure areas, maintained by teams of highly trained technicians. The photograph in Figure P-1 depicts Google’s 115,000-square-foot data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, taken from an interactive website describing Google’s amazing network of data centers (see http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery).

Figure P-1. Google Data Center (Photograph by Google/Connie Zhou)

In the mainframe era, if you outgrew the capacity of a single computer, you needed to come up with millions of dollars to buy another computer. Modern data centers achieve scalable capacity by allocating tasks across large numbers of commodity servers. In the data center era, you allocate as many inexpensive servers as you need and then relinquish those resources when you’re done.

Until recently, data center resources were accessible by the few engineers fortunate enough to work for a new generation of technology companies. However, over the past few years, a revolution has taken place. Just as earlier revolutions in computer hardware made it feasible for more people to access larger numbers of smaller computers, cloud computing enables even greater access, via the public Internet, to vast clusters of computers in modern state-of-the-art ...