The problem they solved isn't easy. But its not some insane technical breakthrough either. Literally add redundancy, thats the ask. They didnt invent quantum computing to solve the issue did they? Why dunk on sprints?

▲

vlovich123 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Wow. What a hand wave away of the intrinsic challenge of writing fault tolerant distributed systems. It only seems easy because of decades of research and tools built since Google did it, but by no means was it something you could trivially add to a project as you can today.

▲

tempest_ 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> fault tolerant distributed systems

I mean there were mainframes which could be described as that. IBM just fixed it in hardware instead of software so its not like it was an unknown field.

	▲	vlovich123 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Even if that were actually true (it’s not in important ways) Google showed you could do this cheaply in software instead of expensive in hardware. You’re still hand waving away things like inventing a way to make map/reduce fault tolerant and automatic partitioning of data and automatic scheduling which didn’t exist before and made map/reduce accessible - mainframes weren’t doing this. They pioneered how you durably store data on a bunch of commodity hardware through GFS - others were not doing this. And they showed how to do distributed systems at a scale not seen before because the field had bottlenecked on however big you could make a mainframe.