How the big search company lets you use their computers to do your own stuff
Written like XKCD’s “Up Goer Five” and “Thing Explainer”
The company that lets you search for things and watch cat movies on your computer, offers a group of services so that you can use the computers they own to make your own things.
When I say their computers, I also mean all the things that go inside computers that make them work; the search company even decides how a lot of those parts have to be made. I also mean the things used by the computers so that they can talk to each other — and to other people’s computers, including yours.
The search company keeps groups of these computers in special computer buildings all around the world. Anyone who pays for it can make use of these computers rather than having to build — and look after — their own computers and special computer buildings.
Being able to use the search company’s computers is really good when you need to use more computers (or better computers) than you have — especially if you only need to use them for a little while or if you don’t want to look after them yourself.
To make things faster and need less money, you don’t use the real computers. Instead, the search company offers services that are like “pretend” computers. You control the pretend computers from your own computer as though they were real — but you can’t go and touch them. The pretend computers work by using the parts from one or more real computers and they can do almost everything a real computer can do.
The search company offers over 50 different services; you can use any of those services by themselves — or together with each other — to set up your own set of pretend computers.
These pretend-computer services are set up so that you won’t notice if the search company has to change or fix their real computers to keep them in good working order. For you, it’ll seem like nothing happened.
All of these services are built on top of the same real computers that the search company uses so that you can search for things and look at cat movies.
Where the search company puts its special computer buildings and how they work together
The search company puts their special computer buildings in lots of places around the world, so that they can be close to a lot of different people who want to use them (or who want to use the things you build with them).
The closer the computer buildings are to the people using them, the faster it is to send information between them. Within each part of the world, the time it takes to get an answer after sending a question from your computer in one in the search company’s special computer buildings — is ten hundred times faster than 5 seconds.
When using the search company’s pretend-computer services, you can choose to use the computers from only one special computer buildings, any of the special buildings in the same part of the world, or (for some services) any of their special buildings anywhere in the world.
Their services are set up so that if something goes wrong with the computers in one of the special computer buildings, it doesn’t spread to the other buildings.
If you choose to use just one building, then if something goes wrong you won’t be able to use your pretend-computer services until it’s fixed. If you choose to use any of the special buildings in the same part of the world, everything will keep working as long as not all of the special buildings there stop working.
If the service you’re using allows it, you can also let the search company decide which of their special computer buildings to use, anywhere in the world. In some cases even using more than one at the same time.
That can make things work a lot faster, and it also makes sure that if anything stops working in one special building (or even all the special buildings in one area), you can still use your pretend-computer services as long as there’s one of their special computer building somewhere in the world that’s still working.
The search company has special computer buildings set up in 18 different places in 6 different parts of the world. In 2016, they said that next year they plan to let you use special computer buildings in another 22 places in another 8 different parts of the world.
