Google Talk -- London - UnixDaemon: In search of (a) life

Google recently held a short talk in London (they are recruiting for their ‘new’ Dublin office) that covered a couple of interesting topics such as redundancy using commodity technology (LOTS of cheap machines with the same data), how to create rolling brown outs (rooms packed full of 80 1U servers in every rack seems to do it) and how to horizontally scale everything to meet their needs.

The one slide that really caught my attention was mostly flippant but makes an important point about the kind of traffic they are dealing with:

1000 queries per second ...
... at 2am ...
... on December 25th

And the killer reason to work at Google? Each staff member is encouraged to spend 20% of their working time looking at new technology and areas of interest. Imagine being given a day a week to work on things that may, at some remote point in the future, positively impact the company.