Google’s Bold Plan to Overthrow Amazon as King of the Cloud
March 24, 2014
Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.
Urs Hölzle oversaw the creation of the world’s largest computer. It’s a machine that spans the globe – from The Dalles, Oregon to Hamina, Finland to Quilicura, Chile – and you use it every day. It’s called Google. In 1999, Hölzle was a computer science professor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked him to help rethink the hardware and software underpinning the Google search engine.
At the time, Google Search ran on about hundred computer servers in a single Northern California data center, and over the next 15 years, alongside some of the brightest minds in computer science, Hölzle would transform this tiny collection of machines into a global network of data centers that operate very much like a single system, allowing Google to operate a vast empire of web services, from Google Search to Gmail to Google Maps to Google Apps…
He’s the man most responsible for ensuring that Google’s services run as efficiently as they do. With an air of extreme confidence – not to mention a diamond stud earring – the Swiss native heads Google’s technical infrastructure team, known "TI" inside the company. When he discusses other Google teams, Hölzle calls them his "customers." The Search team is a customer, and so are the Gmail and Google Maps teams. He and his TI engineers provide the infrastructure – the global computer – that these teams use in delivering their web and mobile services to millions upon millions of people. He is, in short, the man most responsible for ensuring that these Google services run as efficiently as they do…
Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/03/urs-google-story/
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