Interesting Snippets

More than a decade ago, Google built a new foundation for its search engine. It was called the Google File System — GFS, for short — and it ran across a sweeping army of computer servers, turning an entire data center into something that behaved a lot like a single machine…

After Google released research papers describing GFS and a sister software platform called MapReduce — the piece that crunches the data — Yahoo, Facebook, and others built their own version of the Google foundation. It was called Hadoop, and this open source platform is now driving a revolution across the world of business software as well.

But Google no longer uses GFS. Two years ago, the company moved its search to a new software foundation based on a revamped file system known as Colossus… Colossus now underpins virtually all of Google’s web services…

Whereas GFS was built for batch operations — i.e., operations that happen in the background before they’re actually applied to a live website — Colossus is specifically built for “realtime” services, where the processing happens almost instantly