UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE’S FILE SYSTEM

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

When Google revealed its File System (GFS), it was a breakthrough in distributed storage. Designed for storing massive files across commodity hardware, GFS stored files in 64MB chunks replicated across machines for redundancy and performance. A central "master" managed metadata (file names, chunk locations, and versions) and coordinated reads/writes. To append data to files, the client would get write permission from the master, send data to multiple chunk servers, and have the designated "primary" server coordinate final writes.