John Wilkes says that joining Google was like swallowing the red pill in The Matrix.
Four years ago, Wilkes knew Google only from the outside. He was among the millions whose daily lives so deeply depend on things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps. But then he joined the engineering team at the very heart of Google’s online empire, the team of big thinkers who design the fundamental hardware and software systems that drive each and every one of the company’s web services.
These systems span a worldwide network of data centers, responding to billions of online requests with each passing second, and when Wilkes first saw them in action, he felt like Neo as he downs the red pill, leaves the virtual reality of the Matrix, and suddenly lays eyes on the vast network of machinery that actually runs the thing. He was gobsmacked at the size of it all and this was a man who had spent more than 25 years as a researcher at HP Labs, working to push the boundaries of modern computing.
“I’m an old guy. Megabytes were big things,” Wilkes says, in describing the experience. “But when I came to Google, I had to add another three zeros to all my numbers.” Google is a place, he explains, where someone might receive an emergency alert because a system that stores data is down to its last few petabytes of space. In other words, billions of megabytes can flood a fleet of Google machines in a matter of hours.