The Google File System (GFS) was designed by Google to store massive amounts of data across cheap, unreliable hardware. It uses a single master to coordinate metadata and mutations across multiple chunkservers. Files are divided into fixed-size chunks which are replicated for reliability. The design focuses on supporting huge files that are written once and read through streaming, while tolerating high failure rates through replication and relaxed consistency. GFS has proven successful at meeting Google's storage needs at massive scale.

1. Lecture 4 – Distributed Filesystems CSE 490h – Introduction to Distributed Computing, Spring 2007 Except as otherwise noted, the content of this presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

8. Fragmentation

23. The Google File System Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung SOSP 2003 (These slides by Alex Moshchuk)

38. Performance