Challenges in Cloud Scale Data Centers

Keynote presentation at SIGMETRICS 2013

Datacenters are fascinating places, where the massive scale required to deliver on-line services like web search and cloud hosting turns minor issues into major challenges that must be addressed in the design of the physical infrastructure and the software platform. In this talk, I’ll briefly overview the kinds of applications that run in mega-datacenters and the workloads they place on the infrastructure. I’ll then describe a number of challenges seen in Microsoft’s datacenters, with a goal of posing questions more than describing solutions. The audience will leave with a better understanding of how economic factors, technology issues, and software design interact when creating low-latency, low-cost, high availability services.