Google I/O is one of the few times you know Urs Hoelzle is going to speak. Urs is the MAN behind Google's Infrastructure. Urs is Google employee #8. He is wicked smart, got plenty of money to do what ever he wants, and has the backing of the Google executive staff to build for the future.
When most hear the words of "Cloud Services" they think of Amazon Web Services. Amazon.com being a great retailer has a phenomenal presence and selection of Cloud Services. But, I'll tell you something that is not widely known, just because something is well marketing and looks like a good price doesn't mean it is built to last and to handle stress. An example of this I've noticed is ski jackets that get used by ski mountain staff. They wear the jackets multiple times a week, wash every week (we hope), putting more stress on a jacket in a month than most would put on their ski jackets over 5 years. Quickly, they learn what will really last or not, and how it is priced and what brand is many times irrelevant. They learn to look at the material, construction, and quality of the jacket and where their past jackets have broken. fyi, AWS breaks in various areas that developers run into which can frustrate the hell out of them. I know this first hand because my friends have gone through the hell of finding where AWS breaks, and had to make the choice to build the services themselves.
So, let me walk through Urs's keynote and point out some of the cool infrastructure things. Note: I mention in the title than I'll compare to AWS. Well I threw that up to get your attention, but actually there is very little out there if any that discusses AWS infrastructure. It is like a retailer, it is all about price, selection, and selling to the target audience.
If you want to see the presentation go to about 21minute mark in this video.
Here is Urs's title slide.
The next slide, Urs's discusses the physical world of data centers to support the cloud. It's not a bunch of fluffy stuff that scales infinitely. It is built on physics.
Then slides showing the physical infrastructure that Connie Zhou documented in her pictures. There weren't any new pictures that most of you haven't already seen.
The environmental message is delivered.
Google's announcements over the past year of expansion.
Besides building data centers, Google runs their own network with their own sub marine cables
The network spans the world and at some point will most likely reach Africa, Middle East, and India.
One of the thing Google does is it thinks of its SW as infrastructure. Urs reviews the history of the Google SW infrastructure.
At about the 30:24 mark Urs discusses the obsolescence of features to learn from the past and make things better, focusing on quality and performance. Sounds like my ski jacket story above. :-)
163 improvements are listed over 12 months.
Customer wins are discussed on the platform.
To disrupt the business model of an AWS, Google has added sub minute billing.
In the spirit of a little green server, Google has a micro VM of only 0.6 GB.
Getting Cloud to be useful many times requires integrating with on data center services in the company's data center if you can have an encrypted VPN connection.
Persistent disks are useful, but the standard is 1TB. Google has announced 10 TB.
Platform infrastructure is great, but what good is it if you can't develop apps.
To meet the needs of Information Security, Google Cloud Service are ISO 27001 are certified.
If you want to see an app to build at the 45:00 mark you can see a demo of building an app.
In building applications this is what AWS has tons of content on.
