[rsync]

In case anyone else wonders what 'borg' is:

"Our infrastructure is containerized, using a cluster management system called Borg."

I was hoping they had some predictable, indexed build for borg backup[1].

[1] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

[kevincox]

Borg is basically the internal predecessor to Kubernetes.

[tgma]

Predecessor may imply "worse" or "outdated" (although may not be the intent of the OP). I want to clarify that is definitely not the case: Kubernetes is a joke compared to Borg when it comes to running Google workloads (on many dimensions, most importantly scale).

[kevincox]

I don't know about joke. Kubernetes has a much better design and interface than Borg. Often times I am frustrated trying to work around design flaws in Borg.

However yes, Borg has been enriched with about a decade of features and fixes that Google needs. A replacement of Borg is many, many years away.

[kerng]

This post highlights why many start disliking Google - its that vibe of superiority that comes across often. These days Google workload (e.g. qps) isn't that unique anymore...

Moving Borg to Kunernetes will eventually happen because it doesnt make sense to help maintain two systems that solve the same problem. And because Kubernetes is open source it will eventually be superior, because of diverse group of contributions.

[mehrdada]

Huh? How is superiority relevant here? I don’t work at Google (I have in the past) and both systems come out of that company with some of the same people have worked on both. If anything, Google marketing department would probably prefer for people to believe that Kubernetes ~= Borg to help sell GKE, not the other way around. Kubernetes is basically limited to several thousand hosts. That doesn’t even register at Google scale. Other folks do have high QPS systems but none really use Kubernetes to manage the entire cluster; Facebook comes to mind, for example, with an in house system. I would bet against that prediction; I don’t believe such a thing is even on the roadmap internally.

[Thaxll]

It's less and less relevant, a lot of Google things can run on the current limits for k8s: 5000 nodes / 150k pods in a single cluster.

Not everything at Google is large, many other compagnies run very large infra like Google scale on Kubernetes using multiple clusters with federation / regions ect ...

[KaiserPro]

I know this is pedantic, but I'd argue is an inspiration for, in its present state kubernetes is unable to scale to a datacenter, let alone globally at google scale.

[kevincox]

I will agree that it was the inspiration. And I think there is slow movement towards scaling kubernetes.

Note that Borg isn't a global services. There are many instances in different locations. Borg also doesn't scale globally.

[p_l]

Isn't Borg usually scaled to few rows of racks? i.e. not even spanning whole building, yet alone datacenter.