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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

We have an old "quiet part out loud" corporate story. It's about how one arm of Google using our service and wondering why it had so much downtime, only for us to point at their GAE arm and say "when they're down, we're down". They went and talked to GAE and - funny enough - were able to correlate the downtime they observed with GAE downtime.

GAE uptime improved, for a little while. Yeah, we're on AWS now too.

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Does Google run on GCP?

Parts, yes. In reference to the specifics mentioned in here though, those services run on Infra Spanner, not Cloud Spanner, but they're the same stack. The main reason things like Gmail, Ads, etc haven't swapped into GCP is because of the internal tooling that's built up around the infra spanner relating to those services specific to Google that don't make sense in Cloud Spanner.

It's way WAY more than just Infra Spanner vs Cloud Spanner. Cloud spanner doesn't support protobuf, which is annoying, but that's not a dealbreaker; it's still just a DB. The issue is really all the various internal frameworks (such as Apps Framework for Java), deployment systems (Server Platform, AKA Boq/Pod/Urfin), and so forth.

Of course, I was simplifying. It's always more complicated doing a migration. :)

Not just migrations are hard, either; Google Cloud has put (almost?) zero effort into making it easy to use Cloud from systems running on Borg.

My old team was building a system that was half-GCP and half-Borg, and we had to write our own (extremely bad) Cloud Spanner fake for use in tests. In contrast, Infra Spanner is extremely well supported for tests. Same with BigQuery vs Dremel and many other systems.

this is maybe the most ill-informed post about google I've ever seen on this site, wow

From my understanding they don't dogfood a lot of gcp products internally. That's how you end up with janky integrations between their products. It's really frustrating at times to see their cloud architects pitch some grouping of technologies that you should use to find out the integrations aren't well tested at scale. For example, pushing for pubsub to be used with dataflow for near real time processing just to figure out at scale global pubsub has high latency, above 1 minute sometimes 5 minutes, on 1% of messages at scale.

Short answer: No

Borg still? Supposing you can say. Don’t reply if it’s still borg and you can’t.

Mostly not.

Yes in the sense that they use all the services and infrastructure that GCP is built in, but no in the sense of using the vanilla GCP interface.

Instead many aspects of GCP's management console are handled by different internal tools, often command line driven. IME they are often far more unwieldy than GCP.

Sometimes this makes sense (far tighter access controls and configuration change controls than a typical company), and some times it's just because of legacy ways of doing things.

I worked on a team at Google that used the internal GCP to serve some code/content for a specific feature, and it was in some ways it was more frustrating than using just either the normal internal systems or just vanilla GCP.

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