Question by cingos: how are large websites hosted? how are they managed so efficiently, eg. microsoft.com, google.com?
how are they managed, using what tools,dev languages, databases, etc…
are there any sites that list these “inside” stories about the big shots of internet.
Best answer:
Answer by M. L.
First of all, you make the assumption that they are managed efficiently. I think if you saw what was going on behind the scenes you’d gasp in horror. Most large server farms are barely contained chaos.
The reason is that most of these websites grew much, much faster than anyone could have guessed. It is really hard to plan for the future when you have needs of today that need to be solved. Also, technology moves very fast. Just as you roll out some large scale improvement, the next technology advance has already come.
What you end up with are patches on top of patches bound together with bailing wire and duct tape.
Welcome to IT.
Anyway, let’s take Google. Google has literally thousands of rack PCs running a highly modified Linux operating system in data centers around the world. During any particular day at Google, about a hundred servers will fry (no joke).
All of these are managed by a dizzying array of custom software, routers, reverse proxies, edge servers, and probably the world’s largest federated database.
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