SOURCE: TOPIX.NET
The Secret Source of Google's Power
Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.
No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.
I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines.
Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.
Speculation: Gmail's Architecture and Economics
Let's make some guesses about how one might build a Gmail.
Hotmail has 60 million users. Gmail's design should be comparable, and should scale to 100 million users. It will only have to support a couple of million in the first year though.
The most obvious challenge is the storage. You can't lose people's email, and you don't want to ever be down, so data has to be replicated. RAID is no good; when a disk fails...
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