These are my notes from the keynote session MapReduce, BigTable, and Other Distributed System Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean.
The talk was about the three pillars of Google's data storage and processing platform; GFS, BigTable and MapReduce.
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Google hires smart people and lets them work in small teams of 3 to 5 people. They can get away with teams being that small because they have the benefit of an infrastructure that takes care of all the hard problems so devs can focus on building interesting, innovative apps.
If not, find three smart people.