Google hosts many of the world's most prevalent technology solutions, including Search, Maps, and Gmail. These solutions need to be fast and highly available while interacting with staggering amounts of data. Historically, traditional relational database management system (RDBMS) simply could not handle data at Google scale. These Google services require a persistence solution that can be widely distributed for horizontal scalability, locality, and fault tolerance.
When many of these services were being created, there simply was not an existing technology that could effectively provide the level of performance needed. This led Google to explore novel approaches to data persistence, resulting in new technologies that advanced the field. Google has released several seminal papers on the topic of data persistence that laid the groundwork for what would...