There's a bootstrapping issue, of course, but that's how it works. And it's even crazier than what you're picturing. What if I told you that Bigtable runs on t

There's a bootstrapping issue, of course, but that's how it works. And it's even crazier than what you're picturing. What if I told you that Bigtable runs on top of Colossus, but Colossus itself stores metadata about files, including Bigtable's files, in... Bigtable? It's really turtles all the way down, the last of which is, luckily, Chubby. Some of the details here: http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Keynote.pdf http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Ke...