Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to anew breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it.
A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. It runs on the data center, grabbing computing power from any machine than can spare it. Google calls this “warehouse-scale computing,†and for some, it’s an idea so large, they have trouble wrapping their heads around it.
Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. He aims for something even bigger. With a new open-source software project known as Docker, he wants to build a computer the size of the internet.
Read more at Wired.
