Gill and his architecture team are charged with strong-arming Google developers into writing their applications to what is an extremely restrictive set of distributed platforms. “We have a set of primitives, if you would, that takes those collections of atoms – those data centers, those networks – that we’ve built, and then they abstract that entire infrastructure out as a set of services – some of the public ones are GFS obviously, BigTable, MapReduce.

This came up in discussion at BarCamp Sydney also – Google App Engine great (cheap and fast) – if your application/and development approach fits the rules. Some developers saw it as a huge win, others felt that it led to needing all sorts of secondary servers to achieve anything beyond trivial.