Googling for the clouds

Businessweek wrote a great cover story about Google's next big thing: Cloud computing, and it's going to change everything and put incredible computing power in the hands of many.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes.
It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

The story follows Christophe Bisciglia, an angular 27-year-old senior software engineer who landed at Google 5 years ago, and decided to use his 20% of time Google's offers it employees for personal projects to launch a Google course. It would introduce students to programming at the scale of a cloud.
"I had an itch to teach," he says.

He pitched the idea right to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt (who had known him for years), and two months later Google 101 was born.

Schmidt offered one nugget of advice: Narrow down the project to something Bisciglia could have up and running in two months.

Eventually it would lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM, announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like computing clouds.

Its a terrific piece which gives us a little clue of how things are going around Google these days, and of course it gives us a glimpse of what Google has in store for the next few years and where's the tech world is headed to.