Warehouse-Scale computing

a mini-book by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of the Google infrastructure team was released. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines

As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers.

Folks: this is the best description of the systems we have at Google and gives pretty good hints about why people that work at Google often can’t imagine working anywhere else.