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Here’s How Google Makes Sure It (Almost) Never Goes Down

Google, it’s become an ingrained part of our everyday lives now, it’s ever-present and you know when you type in ‘google.com’ into the address bar of your internet browser and press ENTER/RETURN, you have that warm fuzzy feeling as you know Google will be there.

WHEN WAS THE last time you needed to Google something and Google wasn’t there?

Odds are, you don’t remember that ever happening. Sure, there are times when you can’t reach Google because your internet connection is down. But Google’s primary online services, from its search engine to Gmail to Google Docs and more, are nearly always accessible. The company’s Google Apps suite, including Gmail and Docs, was available about 99.97 percent of the time in 2015, according to the company’s own numbers. The world pretty much takes this for granted, but it’s a remarkable reality. The billions who use Google hardly stop to consider how Google made something so impressive seem so mundane.

Google explains the feat in three words: Site Reliability Engineering. OK, they aren’t the best three words. But that’s the rather unsexy name Google gave to this seminal philosophy more than a decade ago. It’s a rather nuanced and expansive philosophy, but it really boils down to one central idea: Don’t get IT people who specialize in running Internet services to run your Internet services. Have software coders run them instead. If you do this, the thinking goes, the software coders will build tools that can help run the operation without the active involvement of real live people.

Continue reading at wired.com

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