Colossus Under The Hood: How We Deliver SSD Performance At HDD Prices
ComputerWeekly, Wednesday, March 26th, 2025
From YouTube and Gmail to BigQuery and Cloud Storage, almost all of Google's products depend on Colossus, our foundational distributed storage system.
As Google's universal storage platform, Colossus achieves throughput that rivals or exceeds the best parallel file systems, has the management and scale of an object storage system, and an easy-to-use programming model that's used by all Google teams. Moreover, it does all this while serving the needs of products with incredibly diverse requirements, be it scale, affordability, throughput, or latency.