Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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Unequivocally no, because it would have been too expensive, probably at least 100x the cost.

AWS is an order of magnitude more expensive than owning your own hardware, and Google was leveraging economies of scale to operate much cheaper than people that owned their own hardware (e.g. fault tolerant software vs. "enterprise grade" hardware)

People didn't realize it at the time, but "search" wasn't Google's only core competency. It was also "warehouse scale computing".

Of course Inktomi under Eric Brewer was another search company that realized that search is a perfect application for clusters of commodity x86 hardware, or networks of workstations (which AFAIK came from academic projects like http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ )

(Don't outsource core functions: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html )

How early did Google start doing "warehouse scale computing"? I was always under the impression they started doing that as a byproduct of their large size.

Obviously it took them a while to get to warehouse scale, but I think they were thinking efficiently from the beginning, like using Legos and cheap racks to hold naked motherboards. http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/... http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google%E2%80%99s_Firs...

Here's a photo set of the initial server rack, showing the use of 1/8'' cork sheets to separate circuit boards from contacting each other:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmuseumofamericanhistory...

In terms of the software, pretty much since the beginning. Even if Google only had 20 machines at first, the difference in mindset and software architecture is to treat each machine as expendable. The code has to be written very differently to account for that, and I think that was done starting fairly early.

In terms of the hardware, I guess it was a few years, whenever Google started building its own servers, building its own data centers, etc.

There are a lot of challenges as you scale, but it's safe to say that it wouldn't have made sense at any point to outsource/use AWS. New ground was being broken.

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