Practice of Cloud System Administration, The: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2

Appendix B. The Origins and Future of Distributed Computing and Clouds

To me it seems quite clear that it’s all just a little bit of history repeating

—Propellerheads

Modern, large datacenters typically consist of rack after rack of pizza box–sized computers. This is a typical design pattern for any large cloud-scale, distributed computing environment. Why is this? How did so many companies arrive at the same design pattern?

The answer is that this design pattern was inevitable. To manage enormous datacenters, hardware and processes must be highly organized. Repeating the same rack structure within a datacenter reduces complexity, which reduces management and administrative overhead. Many other factors led to the choice of hardware to fit into ...