On the topic of standard operating environments, Still said he is amazed at the number of people that don't have SOEs for servers.

"We do, obviously, and it saves our bacon all the time," he said. "If random people can wake up at 3am and know what to expect on a machine then that can stop really embarrassing stuff from happening. So if you don't have that you should get one."

In addition to having a repeatable operating system install, Still recommends having a repeatable application install "so at 3am when you lose one of your Web front ends you are able to bring up another one quickly".

"You need to monitor your machines so you know what's failed, preferably before your users know so you can start looking at it," he said. "We do a lot of that with custom code but there are lots of open source monitoring systems out there that are actually quite good. You also want to keep failure metrics so you know if your mail server is the least reliable portion of your network - it's useful data."

The humble Still believes none of what Google does is gospel and is sure there are other "equally valid" ways of doing keeping systems in check.

"If you've only got six machines then the answer might be to spend $100,000 per machine but if you are going to build apps based on whitebox hardware then you have to assume that hardware is going to fail reasonably regularly," he said.

The exact number of servers used by Google is kept under wraps but speculation puts the total number in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

"Generally you architect things, even smaller internal corporate apps, so that when things fail the app stays up," Still said.