Places we would like to go...

Quite often in the office we will end up having a conversation about some particular company, that does something on a massive scale, and has a relevance to either technology or some sort of large scale logistics (which is something that most of us find pretty fascinating). Usually these are brought up while we’re brainstorming on a particular problem for a client, and inevitably end up with a comment such as ’I wonder how xxx does it?"

In our ideal world, these companies would let us come into the lair and effectively have a guided tour. It’s only so we can have a poke around based on a genuine interest and find out more about how these people work…

So, we decided to formalise this into a list, and let everyone know who we thought had interesting stuff to show:

The Google Datacenters

Google has a massive number of servers, and probably more than anyone else out there. So how do they look after it all? How do they keep these things in trim and functioning correctly? How do they do it on the scale they do?

Amazon shipping

Amazon ship a massive amount of goods. And what’s more, you can buy almost anything and have it shipped from Amazon in a matter of days. So how do they manage this? What systems are in place that mean they stocks coming in, and going out the right people at the right times?

Heroku

Heroku are our hosting company of choice for all of our Ruby on Rails development. We love them as we don’t have to worry about simple things like servers, networking or hardware leaving us to focus on spending all of our time on the product. At time of writing, Heroku are hosting 115,000 applications, so how is this done? What processes manage it and make sure everything is working as it should? How does it manage scale?

Fedex

Fedex move a massive amount of boxes around the world, sometimes in under a day, so how? How do they get millions of parcels, every day, from point A to point B, reliably and on time?

Tesco

Tesco’s essentially these days feeds Britain, which is a lot of food. So how do they make sure that all the stores are stocked on time, especially considering the short shelf life of some products.

Amazon Datacenters

Amazon do hosting on a massive scale. Everyone now seems to be using Amazon S3 for storage, so how does Amazon manage this. For every byte uploaded to S3, Amazon will need to have four or five to store it, and its backups. This is additional to all the disks that are failing on a near constant basis, as well as the growth that needs to be managed.

Ideally, we’ll now get an email from everyone listed above offering us all an all expenses paid trip to see them for the weekend. If not, we can only wonder.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 21 Jan 2011