Google. Amazon. Facebook. Yahoo. These vast online empires don’t just rule the modern Internet, they built it piece by piece. Here’s how.
To build its search engine, Google needed a better way to juggle data. So it created software like MapReduce and Bigtable, which analyze and store data across thousands of machines. Then Facebook, Yahoo, and others cloned those systems and shared them with the world as open source tools with names like Hadoop and MongoDB. Today this kind of megadata setup is the standard way of moving data around on the net.
As services like Google, Amazon, and Facebook expanded, it was clear that the machines they ran on were too expensive and inefficient. So they built sleeker, cheaper hardware and data centers. These new centers are powered by solar panels and wind turbines, and are cooled by ambient air and seawater rather than massive air conditioners. And Facebook, among others, is freely sharing its designs. Which means that building the next great Internet service isn’t as hard as it used to be.
