The amount of data that the big cloud computing providers now store is staggering, so it’s no surprise that most store all of this information as compressed data in some form or another — just like you used to zip your files back in the days of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and low-bandwidth connections. Typically, those systems are closely guarded secrets, but today, Microsoft open sourced the algorithm, hardware specification and Verilog source code for how it compresses data in its Azure cloud. The company is contributing all of this to the Open Compute Project (OCP).
