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Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned

Stanford · 256.9K views · 2011-06-02 · 1:22:45

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Overview

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a classic look at systems engineering at Google, whose fundamentals have held up well despite its 2010 date.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2012–2022

Topics

Distributed systemsTech company stories & documentaries
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jeff deangoogleweb searchscaling

What people said

boulos · 2016-10 · Strong recommendation

In addition to Linus's git talk, I really enjoyed Jeff Dean's EE380 retrospective on Building Systems at Google ( [VIDEO] ). Many people have mentioned Jeff's basic premise elsewhere ("Design a system for 10x your current need, but not 100x, rewrite it before then") but this talk gave several useful examples where tipping points occurred (at least with Search).

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mrazomor · 2022-08 · Recommendation

Probably this one: [LINK] Or this one: [VIDEO] (terrible audio) Both are very old, but extremely well aged. IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well. Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.

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ma2rten · 2020-09 · Recommendation

There is a lecture from Jeff Dean about it: [VIDEO] It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.

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Sources

Video by Stanford, played through YouTube.

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