Google Talks Cloud Computing at the Structure 09 Conference

Several representatives of big Internet companies took the stage at Gigaom's Structure 09 cloud-computing conference, discussing their approaches to distributed computing. Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture, faced Microsoft's Najal Ahmad arguing the different philosophies the two Internet giants adhered to.

Ahmad, Microsoft's global networking services general manager, explained some of the challenges facing companies that size through a big number of applications and services and some of the solutions the software giant came up with. Microsoft's answer is actually having several answers for the different services it offers. This is because the Redmond company believes that it is impossible to come up with just one approach or one set of solutions that would benefit all the applications.

However, Gill was quick to dismiss Microsoft's solution by pointing out some of the ways Google has managed to make its infrastructure expand globally with an emphasis on the software not the hardware behind it. The idea is to get a performance boost across all applications by focusing on the infrastructure and not just on the individual data centers. He went on to list some of the technologies Google had developed and was using, to make the applications distribute as uniformly as possible, like GFS, its file system, BigTable, its distributed database system and MapReduce, the company's software framework for distributed computing.

"We have a set of primitives, if you would, that takes those collections of atoms - those data centers, those networks - that we've built, and then they abstract that entire infrastructure out as a set of services - some of the public ones are GFS obviously, BigTable, MapReduce," Gill told the audience, according to The Register. This way an improvement on one of these technologies would benefit all of the applications running on them. The challenge, Gill believes, is to get the developers working with the set of tools they are provided with and convincing them that this approach offers better results in the long run.