Distributed storage · 2003 · Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff & Shun-Tak Leung
The Google File System
Redesign storage around measured workload facts: routine component failure, huge files, streaming reads, append-heavy writes, and commodity machines.
The central move
Redesign storage around measured workload facts: routine component failure, huge files, streaming reads, append-heavy writes, and commodity machines.
Why it had to exist
Google’s data processing exceeded the assumptions of general distributed filesystems. Failures were common enough to become a normal operating condition rather than an exception.
Where it leads
Failure-aware storage → MapReduce and Bigtable → modern data infrastructure and cloud object stores.