14 DAY TRIAL // It's hard to imagine just how big Google is and the scale it operates at, but there is one thing that everyone should know and that it's not all so surprising. Their servers are running a custom OS based on Linux.
Google started its life in a garage back in 1998, and it's now one of the biggest companies in the world. If you also consider that most of their technology is housed in huge data centers and that Linux is the most used operating system for servers and supercomputers, it's not really surprising to find that Google is using Linux for its backbone.
It is surprising nonetheless that Google hasn't built its own operating system until now, and you can't take Chrome OS into consideration, which is based on the Linux kernel. A comprehensive article on wired.com revealed a lot of interesting information about the search giant, including the fact that they are designing and using their own hardware, but they have yet to find something more powerful that a Linux OS for their computers.
Google is bigger that you might think
Amin Vahdat, Google fellow and technical lead for Networking at Google, detailed some of the software and hardware that goes into its data centers, and it's more than impressive.
"we've increased the capacity of a single datacenter network more than 100x. Our current generation — Jupiter fabrics — can deliver more than 1 Petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth. To put this in perspective, such capacity would be enough for 100,000 servers to exchange information at 10Gb/s each, enough to read the entire scanned contents of the Library of Congress in less than 1/10th of a second," noted Amin Vahdat.
Now, take into consideration that all of this technology is actually powered by Linux, probably a heavily modified OS made by Google itself. It would be cool to know more details about the Linux use in Google, but we'll have to wait a little bit longer until the full paper is published at SIGCOMM 2015 in August.