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Pure speculation: Google was the first to build very high density server farms. As such, they had various proprietary designs and approaches, and became heavil

by payne92 11y ago

Pure speculation: Google was the first to build very high density server farms. As such, they had various proprietary designs and approaches, and became heavily invested. And then it took them a while to decide that leveraging the open source ecosystem would be better than maintaining those various proprietary elements.

atomic77 11y ago
This makes sense. Perhaps Amazon hasn't come far enough along in that process, or, they see their proprietary designs as competitive advantage.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I don't think it is speculation, Google has always considered the infrastructure things they did as a competitive advantage, super top secret stuff that even other employees don't know about kind of silos. And to your second point, it is interesting that OCP (some of it perhaps influenced by people who had worked at Google and then later worked at Facebook) appears to have minimized some of the advantages Google had, and now they find themselves possibly getting behind (one of the nice things, and bad things, about open projects like this are that you get a lot more resources applied to making things better than one company can muster). For similar reasons I wonder if ARM will displace x86 if only because there are probably 15 to 20 independent teams of smart people with ARM architecture licenses making better ARM processors, and perhaps 4 such teams at Intel making improvements in the x86 architecture. At some point it seems "open" seems to eventually overwhelms "walled garden." Although I'm totally open to counter examples where that hasn't been the case.
- jldugger 11y ago
  From what I've seen the challenge ARM faces in the datacenter is support for ECC ram.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    I agree with that, I would love to see an ARM server chip with a full ECC memory path. However I note that ECC memory subsystems are "well understood" from a hardware perspective so one of the teams working on ARM processors will no doubt apply that to their version and we'll if there is more demand than just the two of us :-)
- atomic77 11y ago
  I certainly agree with the underlying idea, and maybe its not an apples to apples comparison, but Openstack would be an example of an open cloud platform that has failed to provide such benefits. Rackspace has largely abandoned the project after initially opening it up, and public clouds based on Openstack seem to be getting shut down left and right (I could go on a long rant about why that is the case, since I am an Openstack contributor :)

by payne92 11y ago

atomic77 11y ago

This makes sense. Perhaps Amazon hasn't come far enough along in that process, or, they see their proprietary designs as competitive advantage.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I don't think it is speculation, Google has always considered the infrastructure things they did as a competitive advantage, super top secret stuff that even other employees don't know about kind of silos. And to your second point, it is interesting that OCP (some of it perhaps influenced by people who had worked at Google and then later worked at Facebook) appears to have minimized some of the advantages Google had, and now they find themselves possibly getting behind (one of the nice things, and bad things, about open projects like this are that you get a lot more resources applied to making things better than one company can muster). For similar reasons I wonder if ARM will displace x86 if only because there are probably 15 to 20 independent teams of smart people with ARM architecture licenses making better ARM processors, and perhaps 4 such teams at Intel making improvements in the x86 architecture. At some point it seems "open" seems to eventually overwhelms "walled garden." Although I'm totally open to counter examples where that hasn't been the case.

jldugger 11y ago
From what I've seen the challenge ARM faces in the datacenter is support for ECC ram.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  I agree with that, I would love to see an ARM server chip with a full ECC memory path. However I note that ECC memory subsystems are "well understood" from a hardware perspective so one of the teams working on ARM processors will no doubt apply that to their version and we'll if there is more demand than just the two of us :-)
atomic77 11y ago
I certainly agree with the underlying idea, and maybe its not an apples to apples comparison, but Openstack would be an example of an open cloud platform that has failed to provide such benefits. Rackspace has largely abandoned the project after initially opening it up, and public clouds based on Openstack seem to be getting shut down left and right (I could go on a long rant about why that is the case, since I am an Openstack contributor :)