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This leads to another point of interest. How astoundingly complex the company is. I believe that organizations naturally evolve until they are as complex as the

This leads to another point of interest. How astoundingly complex the company is. I believe that organizations naturally evolve until they are as complex as the people in them can handle. Well Google is tackling really big, complex problems, and is full of people who can handle a lot of complexity. What do you mean the company is complex? It's not clear to me why solving difficult problems merits organizational or operational complexity.

btilly 17y ago
Try to build something that deals with the amount of data that Google has, as quickly as Google handles it, with everything distributed, replicated, load balanced, and with failover to keep the site up when bad things happen anywhere in the system. (Which happens more often than we would like.) Before you're done you'll have built a lot of pieces of software that do different things that have complex little dependencies on each other. Now iterate that through many generations of development, and build some other systems that tackle similar problems. Do that and you'll discover why Google's infrastructure is complex.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Quick, slightly off-topic question. There's a belief in the industry (I think wrongly) that pretty much the only way to build big complex systems, you need a central "Enterprise Architect" to model all the business processes and use those to drive down to the technology. As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular isolated pieces). Is this true? Or rather? What's Google's method for containing, directing and handling this complexity if it's not a traditional EA thinking process?
  - btilly 17y ago
    Excellent question. I don't think I'm supposed to answer it. However Google's answer would be part of the, "nobody would believe me" piece of neilk's top-rated comment.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      Thanks for entertaining it. Your answer is already pretty informative.

btilly 17y ago

Try to build something that deals with the amount of data that Google has, as quickly as Google handles it, with everything distributed, replicated, load balanced, and with failover to keep the site up when bad things happen anywhere in the system. (Which happens more often than we would like.) Before you're done you'll have built a lot of pieces of software that do different things that have complex little dependencies on each other. Now iterate that through many generations of development, and build some other systems that tackle similar problems. Do that and you'll discover why Google's infrastructure is complex.

elblanco 17y ago
Quick, slightly off-topic question. There's a belief in the industry (I think wrongly) that pretty much the only way to build big complex systems, you need a central "Enterprise Architect" to model all the business processes and use those to drive down to the technology. As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular isolated pieces). Is this true? Or rather? What's Google's method for containing, directing and handling this complexity if it's not a traditional EA thinking process?
- btilly 17y ago
  Excellent question. I don't think I'm supposed to answer it. However Google's answer would be part of the, "nobody would believe me" piece of neilk's top-rated comment.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Thanks for entertaining it. Your answer is already pretty informative.