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Google has released an epic second edition of their ground breaking The Datacenter as a Computer book. It's called an introduction, but at 156 pages I would love to see what the Advanced version would look like!
John Fries in a G+ comment has what I think is a perfect summary of the ultimate sense of the book:
It's funny, when I was at Google I was initially quite intimidated by interacting with an enormous datacenter, and then I started imagining the entire datacenter was shrunk down into a small box sitting on my desk, and realized it was just another machine and the physical size didn't matter anymore
It's such a far ranging book that it's impossible to characterize simply. It covers an amazing diversity of topics, from an introduction to warehouse-scale computing; workloads and software infrastructure; hardware; datacenter architecture; energy and power efficiency; cost structures; how to deal with failures and repairs; and it closes with a discussion of key challenges, which include rapidly changing workloads, building responsive large scale systems, energy proportionality of non-CPU components, overcoming the end of Dennard scaling, and Amdahl's cruel law.
In reading it I get the sense the Faerie Queen has transported us to the land of Faerie, a special other place of timeless truths, where dragons roam, and mortal danger lurks. And if you do escape, nothing is quite the same ever again.
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