Google has acquired a company that will help it run more software on fewer machines — a big deal for a company that has something in the neighborhood of one million servers. Talaria confirmed on its web site Friday that it was purchased by Google and that its software will become part of its Google Cloud team.
Talaria is mum about what it does on its current website, but on a cached version from March 9 it says the company is offering developers the use of “easy” programming languages such as Python or Ruby, while making them more efficient, like a compiled language is. The end result is today’s developers can code in the languages they love and use Talaria’s application server to somehow make that language more efficient.
From the cached version of the website:
At Talaria, we’re building a new, dynamic web application server with a JIT-based runtime at its heart. Today, it supports PHP and runs real-world applications like WordPress and Drupal. Talaria’s application server lets you handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code. Instead of worrying about your server bill, you can get back to building your app.
Facebook has done something that looks similar when it introduced Hip Hop as a way to make its existing PHP code more efficient. HipHop for PHP is a source code transformer that programmatically transforms PHP into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. The social network developed Hip Hop to boost the performance of Facebook applications while also lowering hardware costs.
If Talaria is doing something along these lines, this would help Google in two ways. It would enable Google to deliver a platform for developers that lets developers use their preferred languages, while giving the apps hosted on the Google cloud apps a performance advantage. But it would also help Google by letting it run those apps on fewer machines.
That would help Google lower the costs of operating and running machines, which could give it a leg up in its brutal price war with Amazon Web Services.
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