Ex-Googlers Building Cloud Software That's Almost Impossible to Take Down

Cockroaches are some of the most resilient creatures on earth. They can live for 45 minutes without air and over a month without food. Cutting their heads off won’t even kill them—at least not immediately. Their bodies can live on for several days without their heads.

At technology giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, engineers have pioneered techniques that help make their websites just as hard to kill. If a server goes on the fritz, a series of servers shut down, or even an entire data center goes dark, these sites are supposed to just keep chugging along. That’s vitally important since every second of downtime means lost revenue.