If you've ever doubted that Skynet is here, and that it is being built by Google, you need to go see the two videos the web powerhouse has just released on how their data centers are built. The second video, a tour of their "container based" data centers, is particularly worth watching as it shows just how much thought they've put into doing a data center their own way.

I have visited quite a few data centers over the last few years, including some with more than 45,000 nodes in them, but I've never seen one that looks like this one. In fact, were in not for the transformers and UPSs (and their associated cables snaking throughout), I'd be hard pressed to identify this as a data center at all. That is until you get shown what goes inside one of these containers:

That is the densest gnarliest concentration of computing power that I've seen.

It's interesting to think that despite the fact that we use a nice fluffy term like "cloud computing," the reality for service providers is that they've got to solve a whole bunch of engineering and operations problems to give us that "webtone" that we're all used to. And I suspect that those that do are not only inventing the next major architecture of computing, but also building a formidable advantage over those of us still blundering about with data centers that look like they came out of the dotcom party.