Last Wednesday, students and alumni of La Salle-URL were able to learn first-hand about how Google manages production, services and meets users’ needs through servers. Zeus Gómez Marmolejo, YouTube Core Site Reliability Engineer at Google Zurich, offered a master class on campus in which he shared his experience managing service production at Google.
The Youtube Core System Reliability engineering team is responsible for www.youtube.com, m.youtube.com, and the APIs that are used in mobile applications and developed by third parties. This mainly includes the YouTube interface and its add-ons, v2/GData and v3/Apiary API, and, in Zurich, the Thumbnails and Video Ads service.
Zeus Gómez’s talk at the conference covered how Google manages production, from communications networks to servers, including data centre organisation, oversight, process orchestration, name resolution and storage. Gómez also explained how software at Google is designed and connected to production, and he highlighted the fact that “at Google, we don't say people have failed, but rather it’s the processes that fail”.
Touching on more educational, technical aspects, the event also discussed open-source tools created by Google or third parties, which are very similar to the ones they use internally and which can help entrepreneurs or companies to set up a similar environment at any given company. In this regard, “every role in Google has to know how to program; Google places very high value on initiative, and that's something La Salle-URL is very good at. Personal projects count for a lot at Google”, Gómez added.
Zeus is currently working on the YouTube product line at Google Zurich, Google's biggest office in Europe by number of developers -the third biggest in the world- and where the company concentrates more than 2,000 employees developing products such as Google Maps, Youtube, and Gmail.
