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that is available open source. Increased competition will benefit cloud users, but what direct relevance does this have for MapReduce? The connection is quite simple: processing large amounts of data with MapReduce requires access to clusters with sufficient capacity. However, not everyone with large-data problems can afford to purchase and maintain clusters. This is where utility computing comes in: clusters of sufficient size can be provisioned only when the need arises, and users pay only as much as is required to solve their problems. This lowers the barrier to entry for data-intensive processing and makes MapReduce much more accessible.

      A generalization of the utility computing concept is “everything as a service”, which is itself a new take on the age-old idea of outsourcing. A cloud provider offering customers access to virtual machine instances is said to be offering infrastructure as a service, or IaaS for short. However, this may be too low level for many users. Enter platform as a service (PaaS), which is a rebranding of what used to be called hosted services in the “pre-cloud” era. Platform is used generically to refer to any set of well-defined services on top of which users can build applications, deploy content, etc. This class of services is best exemplified by Google App Engine, which provides the backend datastore and API for anyone to build highly scalable web applications. Google maintains the infrastructure, freeing the user from having to backup, upgrade, patch, or otherwise maintain basic services such as the storage layer or the programming environment. At an even higher level, cloud providers can offer software as a service (SaaS), as exemplified by Salesforce, a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software. Other examples include outsourcing an entire organization’s email to a third party, which is commonplace today.

      What does this proliferation of services have to do with MapReduce? No doubt that “everything as a service” is driven by desires for greater business efficiencies, but scale and elasticity play important roles as well. The cloud allows seamless expansion of operations without the need for careful planning and supports scales that may otherwise be difficult or cost-prohibitive for an organization to achieve. Cloud services, just like MapReduce, represent the search for an appropriate level of abstraction and beneficial divisions of labor. IaaS is an abstraction over raw physical hardware—an organization might lack the capital, expertise, or interest in running datacenters, and therefore pays a cloud provider to do so on its behalf. The argument applies similarly to PaaS and SaaS. In the same vein, the MapReduce programming model is a powerful abstraction that separates the what from the how of data-intensive processing.

1.2 BIG IDEAS

      Tackling large-data problems requires a distinct approach that sometimes runs counter to traditional models of computing. In this section, we discuss a number of “big ideas” behind MapReduce. To be fair, all of these ideas have been discussed in the computer science literature for some time (some for decades), and MapReduce is certainly not the first to adopt these ideas. Nevertheless, the engineers at Google deserve tremendous credit for pulling these various threads together and demonstrating the power of these ideas on a scale previously unheard of.

      Scale “out”, not “up”. For data-intensive workloads, a large number of commodity low-end servers (i.e., the scaling “out” approach) is preferred over a small number of high-end servers (i.e., the scaling “up” approach). The latter approach of purchasing symmetric multi-processing (SMP) machines with a large number of processor sockets (dozens, even hundreds) and a large amount of shared memory (hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes) is not cost effective, since the costs of such machines do not scale linearly (i.e., a machine with twice as many processors is often significantly more than twice as expensive). On the other hand, the low-end server market overlaps with the high-volume desktop computing market, which has the effect of keeping prices low due to competition, interchangeable components, and economies of scale.

      Barroso and Hölzle’s recent treatise of what they dubbed “warehouse-scale computers” [18] contains a thoughtful analysis of the two approaches. The Transaction Processing Council (TPC) is a neutral, non-profit organization whose mission is to establish objective database benchmarks. Benchmark data submitted to that organization are probably the closest one can get to a fair “applesto-apples” comparison of cost and performance for specific, well-defined relational processing applications. Based on TPC-C benchmark results from late 2007, a low-end server platform is about four times more cost efficient than a high-end shared memory platform from the same vendor. Excluding storage costs, the price/performance advantage of the low-end server increases to about a factor of twelve.

      What if we take into account the fact that communication between nodes in a high-end SMP machine is orders of magnitude faster than communication between nodes in a commodity network-based cluster? Since workloads today are beyond the capability of any single machine (no matter how powerful), the comparison is more accurately between a smaller cluster of high-end machines and a larger cluster of low-end machines (network communication is unavoidable in both cases). Barroso and Hölzle model these two approaches under workloads that demand more or less communication, and conclude that a cluster of low-end servers approaches the performance of the equivalent cluster of high-end servers—the small performance gap is insufficient to justify the price premium of the high-end servers. For data-intensive applications, the conclusion appears to be clear: scaling “out” is superior to scaling “up”, and therefore most existing implementations of the MapReduce programming model are designed around clusters of low-end commodity servers.

      Capital costs in acquiring servers is, of course, only one component of the total cost of delivering computing capacity. Operational costs are dominated by the cost of electricity to power the servers as well as other aspects of datacenter operations that are functionally related to power: power distribution, cooling, etc. [18; 67]. As a result, energy efficiency has become a key issue in building warehouse-scale computers for large-data processing. Therefore, it is important to factor in operational costs when deploying a scale-out solution based on large numbers of commodity servers.

      Datacenter efficiency is typically factored into three separate components that can be independently measured and optimized [18]. The first component measures how much of a building’s incoming power is actually delivered to computing equipment, and correspondingly, how much is lost to the building’s mechanical systems (e.g., cooling, air handling) and electrical infrastructure (e.g., power distribution inefficiencies). The second component measures how much of a server’s incoming power is lost to the power supply, cooling fans, etc. The third component captures how much of the power delivered to computing components (processor, RAM, disk, etc.) is actually used to perform useful computations.

      Of the three components of datacenter efficiency, the first two are relatively straightforward to objectively quantify. Adoption of industry best-practices can help datacenter operators achieve state-of-the-art efficiency. The third component, however, is much more difficult to measure. One important issue that has been identified is the non-linearity between load and power draw. That is, a server at 10% utilization may draw slightly more than half as much power as a server at 100% utilization (which means that a lightly loaded server is much less efficient than a heavily loaded server). A survey of five thousand Google servers over a six-month period shows that servers operate most of the time at between 10% and 50% utilization [17], which is an energy-inefficient operating region. As a result, Barroso and Hölzle have advocated for research and development in energy-proportional machines, where energy consumption would be proportional to load, such that an idle processor would (ideally) consume no power, but yet retain the ability to power up (nearly) instantaneously in response to demand.

      Although we have provided a brief overview here, datacenter efficiency is a topic that is beyond the scope of this book. For more details, consult Barroso and Hölzle [18] and Hamilton [67], who provide detailed cost models for typical modern datacenters. However, even factoring in operational costs, evidence suggests that scaling out remains more attractive than scaling up.

      Assume failures are common. At warehouse scale, failures are not only inevitable, but commonplace. A simple calculation suffices to demonstrate: let us suppose that a cluster is built from reliable machines with a mean-time between failures (MTBF) of 1000 days (about three years). Even with these reliable servers, a 10,000-server cluster would still experience roughly

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