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Comment by erik_seaberg | Hacker News Reader

Google did a lot of pioneering work and created a proprietary stack. This used to be a big competitive advantage, but the industry largely caught up and now the incompatibility is mostly just tech debt that everyone has to ramp up on.

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A lot of what's required in onboarding is domain knowledge. Say a fintech engineer gets a job in industrial controls or vice versa; there will be considerable time spent learning about the industry itself, regulatory environment, etc.

Are you speaking as a Googler/Xoogler? They come out with impressive projects like Kube and their build system, I would be surprised if their in house stack can really be described entirely as "tech debt".

Xoogler from a few years ago. I'm not saying they have nothing cutting edge, just that the rest of the industry eventually reached parity with a lot of their everyday platforms. If you come in knowing HDFS and Cassandra and Spark and k8s, moving to CFS and BigTable and Flume and Borg involves learning a whole lot of minor differences that don't make you much more capable but screw up code reuse.

I was pleased to see Cloud Spanner hit the market, and trying to nudge the industry towards hermetic builds with Bazel.

What's CFS? Cloud Filestore?

Details are fuzzy but I think CFS is a name for part of Colossus, a rewrite of GoogleFS.

https://cloud.google.com/files/storage_architecture_and_chal...

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