royans

MapReduce , Bigtable and Pregel have their origins in Google and they all deal with “large systems”. But all of them may be dwarfed in size and complexity by a new project Google is working on, which was mentioned briefly (may be un-intentionally) at an event last year. Instead of caching data closer to user, it looks like Google is trying to take “the data” to the user. If you use GMail or a Google Doc service, then with this framework, Google could, auto-magically, “move” one of the master copies of your data to the nearest Google data center without really having to cache anything locally. And because they are building one single datastore cluster around the world, instead of building hundreds of smaller ones for different applications, it looks like they may not don’t need dedicated clusters for specific projects anymore. Below is the gist of “Spanner” from a talk by Jeff Dean at Symposium held at Cornell . Take a look at the rest of the slides if you are in