Abstract :
It goes without saying that Google\´s technical infrastructure has improved since those slap dash early days. But Google is loath to reveal much about its back-end operations. In interviews with IEEE Spectrum, the company\´s engineers would often preface their purposely vague answers with, "We don\´t want to talk about specifics" or "We can\´t talk about it a lot." Google has even attempted to keep secret the locations of many of its three dozen or so data centers, which include 20 scattered across the United States. Of course, that is absurdly hard to do with multimillion-dollar warehouse like facilities that must be approved by local officials, checked by government inspectors, and constructed in plain sight. So considerable information about Google\´s data infra structure can now be found by just, well, googling Google. Facebook, too, quickly catapulted from a student project to a dominant player on the Web. And Facebook\´s engineers have also had to pedal hard to keep up with the site\´s speedy rise in popularity. Indeed, these two companies have in many respects led strangely parallel lives-each of them opened its first data center in its seventh year of operation, for example.
