Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade (video presentation, Luiz Andre Barroso, Google)

This talk addresses how cloud computing is changing in today's time.

Barroso does a short introduction of explaining the usefulness of cloud computing, and how the pervasiveness of the Internet has helped cloud computing to really take off.

He discusses how flash may help the cloud providers, but with a few restrictions. The durability of flash lowers the cost-benefit ratio and the overall cost of flash is often not worth it. However, flash is fast and so it would be really great if it could be used in datacenters.

It seems servers now are becoming more energy-efficient, and the energy proportionality slope is getting closer to 1. This is great because most servers are not run at 100% and so we care a lot more about how energy-efficient servers are around while running 20%-50%.

Barroso also makes a very good comment in that although hardware (specifically I/O) has been increasing, a lot of the software stacks have not been updated for the new bandwidths available by the new hardware. I agree that a lot of the computing world has abandoned latency for throughput. Barroso makes a good point in saying now that hardware has improved, we should go back to look how we would redesign software to provide better latencies with the new hardware.