Cockroaches are some of the most resilient creatures on earth. They can live for 45 minutes without air and over a month without food. Cutting their heads off won't even kill them ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-cockroach-can-live-without-head/ )-at least not immediately. Their bodies can live on for several days without their heads.
At technology giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, engineers have pioneered techniques that help make their websites just as hard to kill. If a server goes on the fritz, a series of servers shut down, or even an entire data center goes dark, these sites are supposed to just keep chugging along. That's vitally important since every second of downtime means lost revenue.
Now, a team of open source developers ( Ex-Googlers ) wants to make it easier for just about any company to build the sort of resilient cloud computing systems that run online empires like Google. They call their project CockroachDB (github source: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach), billing it as a database with some serious staying power. That may sound like an odd name for a piece of software, but co-creator Spencer Kimball-a former Google engineer-says it's only appropriate. "The name is representative of its two most important qualities: survivability, of course, and the ability to spread to the available hardware in an almost autonomous sense."
Related: Inside Google Spanner, the Largest Single Database on Earth http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/all/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 24 2014, @10:47AM
So this is by super awesome ex-Googlers, right? As in former Googlers? How do we know they are Genuine(tm) ex-Googlers? Are they as awesome as former Googlers?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 24 2014, @01:40PM
It is written in Go, so they must be super genuine.
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 25 2014, @08:14AM
Well, an ex-googler is someone who is no longer a googler. Now, according to the rules of the language, a googler is someone who googles. To google means to search the internet using Google's search engine. So a googler is someone who uses Google to do internet searchers, and an ex-googler is someone who no longer uses Google to to do internet searches. ;-)
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