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Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google? How would they turn that

Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google? How would they turn that inside out? What would GCP actually run on if they ran GCP on GCP? Or do you mean run search/gmail/youtube on GCP? Isn't their internal infra basically kubernetes in all but name?

kenforthewin 7y ago
I've heard that Google is bad at dog fooding their own cloud infrastructure and even that Borg is still dominant over Kubernetes in their internal infra but don't have any insider knowledge. If true this is one thing that Amazon is vastly superior than Google at.
- brojonat 7y ago
  Yeah there was a post about that on HN that got a lot of attention a week or two ago. I think that letter/essay was written before google cloud platform was really a thing, would be interesting to know how things have changed since ~2006.
- pradn 7y ago
  Internal teams are using some GCP services, but overall nearly all teams stick with Borg. Many key services like Search are not able to switch to GCP b/c performance degradation.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying.
oldmanhorton 7y ago
At least in azure, the "platform" that azure runs on doesn't have anything like a managed sql database or a distributed queue service. It's strictly a compute platform. I'd imagine GP is suggesting that only the things that absolutely must run on internal-only infra do so and the rest like YouTube or Gmail run purely on top of GCP (which only happens to be on top of internal infra)
skybrian 7y ago
It depends where you are in the stack. At a low level they're using the same data centers, but the public stuff like GCP and Kubernetes is a rewrite of earlier internal software and migration of higher-level servers to a different stack is nontrivial.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Amazon Cloud itself is not externally available, and runs on parts of its infrastructure that are non-public. It's like GCP in that regard, except that most of the rest of Amazon's products are then built on top of this cloud, whereas with Google that's not the case; there's a parallel internal-only infrastructure that every Google product you've ever heard of (Search/Gmail/YouTube/etc) runs on.
- dastbe 7y ago
  (I work at AWS) One of the more interesting things I've observed over the past few years is the incremental effort to get AWS teams "lower in the stack" onto native AWS offerings. This makes sense: the less parallel or underlying infrastructure you have to maintain to scale and support the public cloud, the more time and attention you can devote to public services. Many (most?) new AWS services are fully native AWS (including the one I work on :)), and design and operational readiness reviews require justification for not using native AWS rather than the opposite.

kenforthewin 7y ago

I've heard that Google is bad at dog fooding their own cloud infrastructure and even that Borg is still dominant over Kubernetes in their internal infra but don't have any insider knowledge. If true this is one thing that Amazon is vastly superior than Google at.

brojonat 7y ago
Yeah there was a post about that on HN that got a lot of attention a week or two ago. I think that letter/essay was written before google cloud platform was really a thing, would be interesting to know how things have changed since ~2006.
pradn 7y ago
Internal teams are using some GCP services, but overall nearly all teams stick with Borg. Many key services like Search are not able to switch to GCP b/c performance degradation.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying.

oldmanhorton 7y ago

At least in azure, the "platform" that azure runs on doesn't have anything like a managed sql database or a distributed queue service. It's strictly a compute platform. I'd imagine GP is suggesting that only the things that absolutely must run on internal-only infra do so and the rest like YouTube or Gmail run purely on top of GCP (which only happens to be on top of internal infra)

skybrian 7y ago

It depends where you are in the stack. At a low level they're using the same data centers, but the public stuff like GCP and Kubernetes is a rewrite of earlier internal software and migration of higher-level servers to a different stack is nontrivial.

CydeWeys 7y ago

Amazon Cloud itself is not externally available, and runs on parts of its infrastructure that are non-public. It's like GCP in that regard, except that most of the rest of Amazon's products are then built on top of this cloud, whereas with Google that's not the case; there's a parallel internal-only infrastructure that every Google product you've ever heard of (Search/Gmail/YouTube/etc) runs on.

dastbe 7y ago
(I work at AWS) One of the more interesting things I've observed over the past few years is the incremental effort to get AWS teams "lower in the stack" onto native AWS offerings. This makes sense: the less parallel or underlying infrastructure you have to maintain to scale and support the public cloud, the more time and attention you can devote to public services. Many (most?) new AWS services are fully native AWS (including the one I work on :)), and design and operational readiness reviews require justification for not using native AWS rather than the opposite.