What the Heck Is Hyperscale? | kc8apf.net

What the Heck Is Hyperscale?

Posted

May 6, 2020

3:40 PM

UTC-07:00

I first heard the term hyperscale around 2013 when I was managing Google’s data center hard drive software team. As hard drive and SATA controller vendors came in to share their road maps, they started referring to the needs of hyperscalers as something different from those of traditional enterprise users. Google’s needs being different from traditional enterprise wasn’t new but the term hyperscale to refer to Google and others was. Google didn’t use this term internally. As far as I know, Amazon and Facebook didn’t either. Our needs didn’t always overlap either. What did the industry mean by calling us hyperscale?

Seven years later, I’m still wondering what hyperscale means. Research papers and marketing materials talk about hyperscalers without ever clarifying what it means. Who qualifies as a hyperscaler? What are the criteria? I set out to find a definition that answers these questions and, finding little, created my own.

Looking for an origin story

With how broadly used the term is, I naively assumed that someone must have defined it somewhere yet web searches turned up nothing useful. After a few false starts, I discovered that I could filter Google search results with a date range. This was still far from ideal as many results would show very old dates despite the contents being obviously more up to date. Regardless, I could find candidate results this way and then check the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to check that the content at the date claimed by Google.

Using that method, the earliest use of hyperscale (as related to computing) I’ve been able to find is “Creating a Hyper-efficient Hyper-scale Data Center” in Dell Power Solutions magazine’s February 2008 issue. While the bulk of the article is pitching Dell’s newly formed Data Center Solutions Division, the introduction gives an overview of how cloud and large cluster computing environments differ from traditional environments. The article highlights how these environments focus on maximizing efficiency at every level of data center design from machines to power and cooling infrastructure. While this is generally true, the article places the emphasis on solutions used by these environments–rather than when those solutions are appropriate. Does simply choosing to trim unnecessary components from servers and using a hot aisle make you a hyperscaler? I’m inclined to say no. I’m also a bit dubious that Dell understood hyperscale well enough at the time to speak authoritatively. The same article describes these cloud computing environments as containing thousands, or even tens of thousands, of servers. By 2008, Google and Amazon had deployed well over a hundred thousand servers.

Crowd sourcing a definition

With my search for an origin story failing to uncover a definition, I began to wonder if our collective usage of the term hyperscale would uncover some consistent traits that could be formed into a definition. Knowing that my Twitter followers tend to skew toward servers and hyperscale, I posed the question there:

So, uh, what _is_ hyperscale? What are the qualities of a hyperscale design? Asking as someone who worked in Google's server design group for nearly a decade.<br>— Rick Altherr (@kc8apf) March 31, 2020

I anticipated diverse responses especially as retweets began to elicit responses from a broader audience. Depsite my anticipation, I was dumbfounded by the breadth of attributes and decisiveness in responses. Here are a few responses to give a flavor:

A combination of application and infrastructure architecture where the application can scale up or down without limit and with minimal effort thanks to automation that abstracts infrastructure away. You might have a light that says "order more racks" but that's about it.<br>— Nick 🦇🕸🖤 (@ExplodingLemur) April 1, 2020

I don't have an authoritative answer, but I think this is part of the definition:

“designing one's own compute electronics because at the fleet-size we deploy there's gains to be made”

It probably also includes “designing one's own firmware”, or “... own networking gear” too.<br>— Luis Bruno 🟡 (@luisbruno) March 31, 2020

I don't think the sheer number of servers makes a hyperscaler though.

The ratio of dedicated technitions & sysadmins per server seems to matter.<br>— Matt King (@syncsrc) April 1, 2020

A _design_ doesn't make you hyperscale. Scale does.

Proposed criteria could be something like: an organization that represents a material percentage of the deployment of commodity general purpose server processors manufactured per year.<br>— Matthew S. Wilson (@_msw_) March 31, 2020

Nodes are simpler because hyperscaler can make simplifying homogeneous infra assumptions and/or they don't have to handle their own hw errors.

Machine = dumb data collector. Higher level systems figure out what to do to fix them.

(Gross simplification on my part here, too)<br>—...