Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN recommends it as a classic look at systems engineering at Google, whose fundamentals have held up well despite its 2010 date.
“It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.”HN comment, 2020
“I really enjoyed Jeff Dean's EE380 retrospective on Building Systems at Google”
Concrete examples of scaling tipping points in Google Search.
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In addition to Linus's git talk, I really enjoyed Jeff Dean's EE380 retrospective on Building Systems at Google ( this video ). Many people have mentioned Jeff's basic premise elsewhere ("Design a system for 10x your current need, but not 100x, rewrite it before then") but this talk gave several useful examples where tipping points occurred (at least with Search).
Recommendskqr2Dec 2012
“Also recommend Jeff Dean's tech talk Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned”
Jeff Dean talk referencing the latency numbers and Google systems design.
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Also recommend Jeff Dean's tech talk Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned which references those latency numbers. Slides: link Video: this video Also, a previous thread on latency numbers: link
Recommendsma2rtenSep 2020
“It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.”
Jeff Dean lecture whose fundamentals still hold.
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There is a lecture from Jeff Dean about it: this video It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.
RecommendsmrazomorAug 2022
“Both are very old, but extremely well aged.”
Explains why Google Search's speed comes from systems engineering.
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Probably this one: link Or this one: this video (terrible audio) Both are very old, but extremely well aged. IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well. Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.
Cites itignoramousFeb 2019
Dated Jeff Dean presentation on building software at Google.
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Google is famous for publishing a lot of material every year. A couple of related publications you might be interested in: 1. The Datacenter as a computer: link 2. The SRE book: link A couple of dated presentations: 1. Jeff Dean on building software systems at Google (2010) at Stanford: this video 2. Notes by James Hamilton on a talk by Jeff Dean on Google Datacenters in 2008: link -- Microsoft Research pretty much work on bleeding edge tech, as well and publish about some of their research pretty regularly. Here's a staring point to help anyone interested find relevant publications: link
