The Datacenter as a Computer
This book describes warehouse-scale computers (WSCs), the computing platforms that power cloud computing and all the great web services we use every day. It discusses how these new systems treat the datacenter itself as one massive computer designed at warehouse scale, with hardware and software working in concert to deliver good levels of internet service performance. The book details the architecture of WSCs and covers the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. Each chapter contains multiple real-world examples, including detailed case studies and previously unpublished details of the infrastructure used to power Google's online services. Targeted at the architects and programmers of today's WSCs, this book provides a great foundation for those looking to innovate in this fascinating and important area, but the material will also be broadly interesting to those who just want to understand the infrastructure powering the internet. The third edition reflects four years of advancements since the previous edition and nearly doubles the number of pictures and figures. New topics range from additional workloads like video streaming, machine learning, and public cloud to specialized silicon accelerators, storage and network building blocks, and a revised discussion of data center power and cooling, and uptime.
Stats for nerds
9recommend
20mentions
17people
2013–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Two others listed here: https://sre.google/books/, "Building Secure & Reliable Systems" and "The Site Reliability Workbook".
I would also mention "The Datacenter as a Computer: designing warehouse-scale machines". https://research.google/pubs/the-datacenter-as-a-computer-de...
- You could interpret this the other way - Why has Jeff Dean been snubbed by the Nobel committee? Why hasn't Larry Page gotten a Nobel for inventing the search technology that half the planet now depends on? I don't know what category to put that one in, but there's some important results in lightspeed-limited communications in "The Datacenter as a Computer" that would be worth extending the Physics category for.
- They do publish some of that, or at least they used to. In particular "The Datacenter as a Computer" [0] was a very interesting read.
[0] https://research.google/pubs/the-datacenter-as-a-computer-an...
- His book "The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines" was immensely valuable to me as I moved into datacenter management as a new-grad. RIP.
- In "The Datacenter as a Computer" there was an interesting diagram sketching a datacenter memory hierarchy latency and capacity and bandwidth to access RAM, SSD, and HDD in the same machine, the same rack, and a larger cluster. It's page 72 of https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y... and with luck https://books.google.com/books?id=Td51DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA72 will get you to the page. The numbers have changed (commodity SSDs have markedly improved!) but the idea still makes sense.
Fun to consider that boxes under one top-of-rack switch can hold dozens of TB of RAM and hundreds of TB of Flash with latency measured in µs between them. There's legitimately interesting space in between writing code for a single machine and code for huge, spread-out clusters of thousands of boxes.
- There’s a book: “The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines” (free to download).
https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y...
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