This is a tangent, because hosting providers didn't really use distributed computing back in 90's. They don't really have to solve any coordination problems be

This is a tangent, because hosting providers didn't really use distributed computing back in 90's. They don't really have to solve any coordination problems because every customer is separate by definition. As far as I understand, their conception of distributed computing was limited to sys admins maintaining NFS and so forth. But going off on this tangent: I don't think BigTable was a major milestone in terms of fault-tolerant clusters of commodity PCs. For example here is a write-up paper from 2003 that describes Google's search clusters: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dbrooks/cs246-fall2004/google.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~dbrooks/cs246-fall2004/google.p... Google’s racks consist of 40 to 80 x86-based servers mounted on either side of a custom made rack (each side of the rack contains twenty 20u or forty 1u servers). Our focus on price/performance favors servers that resemble mid-range desktop PCs in terms of their components This architecture existed for a few years before BigTable did. Also, Google didn't invent this architecture. I did some research on this several years ago -- it appears that Eric Brewer's work at Inktomi in the 90's had an architecture that was largely similar to Google. I also think there was a name for it other than "RAIN". But I can't recall now. This isn't the paper I'm thinking of, but it's from 1997 and has a lot of the ideas from Google (which became a company in 1998): Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/papers/TACC-sosp.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/papers/TACC-sosp.pd... We observe that clusters of workstations have some fundamental properties that can be exploited to meet these requirements: using commodity PCs as the unit of scaling allows the service to ride the leading edge of the cost/performance curve, the inherent redundancy of clusters can be used to mask transient failures, and "embarrassingly parallel" network service workloads map well onto networks of workstations. ---- Ah OK I found it, the term is "Networks of Workstations". From 1994: A Case for NOW (Networks of Workstations) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1089787370567533783&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10897873705675337... I believe this work influenced first Inktomi and then Google... since the last author is Patterson, that's pretty easy to believe. There are some stories about the Google prototype at Stanford (backrub) using every workstation they could cobble together. In this paper, we argue that because of recent technology advances, networks of workstations (NOWs) are poised to become the primary computing infrastructure for science and engineering, from low end interactive computing to demanding sequential and parallel applications. We identify three opportunities for NOWs that will benefit endusers: dramatically improving virtual memory and file system performance by using the aggregate DRAM of a NOW as a giant cache for disk; achieving cheap, highly available, and scalable file storage by using redundant arrays of workstation disks, using the LAN as the I/O backplane; and finally, multiple CPUs for parallel computing.