Dennis Laumen We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals

Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center →

'Google Infrastructure, Photo: Connie Zhou'

Great article by Steven Levy on on how Google runs its data centers (although there's a lot of retreading from the excellent In The Plex). As a software engineer I was especially envious when reading the following paragraph:

This is tremendously empowering for the people who write Google code. Just as your computer is a single device that runs different programs simultaneously—and you don’t have to worry about which part is running which application—Google engineers can treat seas of servers like a single unit. They just write their production code, and the system distributes it across a server floor they will likely never be authorized to visit.

It's incredible how often hardware reality interferes with my awesome code.