Couldn't agree with this more. One of the things that's not immediately apparent in an initiative like this is the huge amount of effort required to provision,

Couldn't agree with this more. One of the things that's not immediately apparent in an initiative like this is the huge amount of effort required to provision, deploy and manage a system of this scale, across a whole bunch of different teams. We couldn't have done any of this without a tremendous group of SREs with the wisdom to invest heavily in automation, in addition to all the hard work. We'll follow up in a week or two with a blog post highlighting some of the work here. I think the framework for disk remediation (automatically detecting failures, re-provisioning, etc) is particularly interesting.