Google Prepares for Millions of Servers

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

The goal for Google in this case is to dynamically adapt to the requirements of their workloads. It sounds great in theory. Ten million servers is an incredible number of machines to manage, without some very sophisticated software it would be quite a difficult task. If they can pull it off there are numerous benefits.

...including a “follow the moon” strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.

In increasingly large and complex environments it is clear that sophisticated automation will be required to address the inherent challenges in managing large numbers of servers and applications.