| Yeah my memory of this (which is admittedly fuzzy) is that a bunch of business things happened around 2012-2015, which led to these external software libraries / products that are "arguably inferior rewrites" and "not what Google actually uses" I think 2012 is when Larry became CEO (again), and 2015 is when the "Alphabet" re-org / re-naming happened. 1. Larry Page was generally unhappy with the direction and execution of the company, so he became CEO. (Schmidt would never be CEO again) 2. VP Bill Coughran was shown the door (my interpretation, which is kind of like Eric Schmidt being shown the door). For my entire time there he had managed the software systems -- basically everything in google3, or everything important there 3. Urs Hoezle took over everything in technical infrastructure. I think he had previously been focused on hardware platforms and maybe SRE; now he was in charge of software too. Urs sorta combined this "rewrite google3" thing with the "cloud" thing. To me there was always a tenuous connection there, at least technically. I can see why it made sense from a business perspective --- Basically Larry was unhappy with google3 because the company wasn't shipping fast enough, e.g. compared to Facebook. It was perceived as mired in technical debt and processes (which IMO was essentially true, and maybe inevitable given how fast the company had grown for ~8 years) And I think they were also looking over their shoulders at AWS, which I think by then had become "clearly important". Why don't we have an AWS thing? At some point GCE was kind of a small project in Seattle, and then it became more important when AWS became big. Anyone remember when Urs declared that google3 was deprecated and everything was going to be written on top of cloud in 12 to 18 months? (what he said was perhaps open to interpretation -- I think he purposely said something really ambitious to get everyone fired up) So there was this shift to "externalize" infrastructure, make it a real product. Not just have internal customers, but external ones too. --- So I think what you said is accurate, and I think that is the business context where the "arguably inferior rewrites" came from - Kubernetes is worse in many ways than Borg [1] - gRPC (I haven't used it) is apparently worse in many ways than Stubby, etc. I'd be interested if anyone has different memories ... --- [1] although I spent some time reading Borg source code, and e.g. compared to say the D storage server, which was also running on every node, it was in bad shape, and inefficient. There are probably ways that K8s is better, etc. My main beef is the unimaginable complexity of running K8s on top of GCE on top of Borg -- i.e. 3 control planes stacked on top of each other ... |