[engizeer]

All given, the fact that Google itself doesn't extensively use GC is kind of a red flag(I know quite a few Googlers from search infrastructure and none of them said their teams used GCE internally).

A solid guarantee with AWS is if AWS goes down, then a multitude of Amazon's services also will go down(ex Amazonian myself), so it gives me a belief that AWS's uptime is more important to Amazon itself that it is for external customers.

[boulos]

Search Infra (and Ads for that matter) is an extreme case. Google Search might be one of the worlds most highly tuned infrastructure projects: a marriage of code and hardware design to maximize performance, scoring, relevance and ultimately ROI.

Before we had custom machine types (November 2015 GA), we wouldn't have been remotely close to what they needed. I'm not even sure we've had anyone evaluate the amount of overhead KVM adds in either latency or throughput.

tl;dr: Don't let Search be your "not until they do it". We've got folks in Chrome, Android, VR, and more building on top of Cloud (as well as much of our internal tooling being on App Engine specifically).

[tlarkworthy]

Google Firebase uses GCP including GCE extensively.

(Firebase Engineer here)