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Interesting, can you elaborate a bit on "cloud-based" development vs for example a traditional workflow of git and a central repo?

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Google has a monorepo in which nearly all of the company's code is stored. The monorepo uses a custom implementation of Perforce. No personal computer could download a whole copy of the repo. So for that reason people need to check out a virtual/cloud copy of the repo in order to do work. This has the added benefit (for google) of not allowing individuals to have code on their device which is bad if the employee loses their device or has it stolen.

There are some exceptions for some teams (like Chrome). And when I was there exceptions for people who did mobile (iOS/Android) development, though Google was moving pretty aggressively towards a world where even iOS code wasn't allowed on the employee's device.

It's been a while since I've used Perforce, but wouldn't each team have their own 'path' in the depot and set their clientspec to only download that? Why would anyone, other than a build machine, need the whole repo?

Not a Googler but we do have a monorepo... you can start with a team specific path, but you feed that to the build system and ask it to identify all the other paths where your (transitive) dependencies are.

Should've read the entire post first. o\

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