Kelsey Hightower
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Everything is immaculate.
So a lot of people have worked in data centers and it's a mess.
Wires are all over the place.
You know, you're ad hoc adding and removing servers.
But Google was systematic.
Those machines came off a truck.
They were wrapped perfectly.
When you wheeled them into their spot, you connected the network cables.
They would pixie boot.
They would burn in.
So part of the job was, you know, you walked around with a crash cart.
So depending on what your abilities were, some people had pretty straightforward jobs.
You had a crash cart, had all your tools on it, and you would walk around and you would find machines that were needing of repair.
So if you have 200,000 machines, it's okay if like 300 of them are broken.
The system can route around that.
But if they were broken, they needed to be repaired.
So you would go to rack A, server 7.
You would pull it out and you would look at it and say, oh yeah, the SATA card is on fire.
Like it's literally burned.
It's burning.