Consider:
- Google's intricate and massive data center operations, wherein Google is not only leading the pack in building distributed computing and database infrastructure, but building massive operations to run those systems.
<li>"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Alan Kay, creator of Smalltalk, object-oriented programming, and many other things that are good in your software development life, said that.</li>
I think Alan Kay’s quote could be rewritten for modern times to say, “Those who are really serious about large applications should make their own datacenters”. Assembling hardware, putting it into racks, putting the racks into data centers, and building out your own data centers are the analog of building your own hardware for software service companies these days.
You probably don’t need expert-level knowledge of these disciplines to write software today (e.g. I know diddly-squat about how packets find their way through the modern internet). You will, however, have a leg up if you’re aware of the possibilities and know how to take advantage of them. Even if you’re building applications with modest capacity needs, knowing how to set up a failover database and when to pay for physical hardware instead of virtualized hosts is a thing that will make your customers and clients happy.
More concisely: when it comes to running your software on hardware, one size does not fit all; know how and when to tailor your application to the hardware, no matter what size your application wears.
