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Thank you. Like others, I believe Google keeps its infrastructure secret because that is a competitive advantage. Their infrastructure is their business. It mak

by andos 15y ago

Thank you. Like others, I believe Google keeps its infrastructure secret because that is a competitive advantage. Their infrastructure is their business. It makes sense for Facebook to openly publish its datacenter design because that's not what Facebook is about: they could be running from AWS for all we care -- the social graph is kept very much closed, however. Opensourcing seems to be the radical approach to commoditizing complements. But I would love if Google opened up about that, anyway. I am an avid reader of their service failure post-mortems because they reveal a tiny bit of what goes on inside their data centers. And because the way Google stuff fails is admirably beautiful.

DennisP 15y ago
Here's an ex-Google engineer who thinks Google's software infrastructure is obsolete, compared to opensource offerings: http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye
- nostrademons 15y ago
  When this was discussed on Quora, a bunch of other Googlers chimed in and said basically "no, not really": http://www.quora.com/Google/Is-Googles-software-infrastructure-obsolete http://www.quora.com/Google/Is-Googles-software-infrastructu... I wasn't one of them, but I agree. Google's internal infrastructure has its warts, but it's generally light years more stable and reliable than anything you can get open-source. I have a teammate that worked with Hadoop in previous jobs; he said that there's no comparison between it and MapReduce. I used JSON for my previous startup's core data storage; were I to do it over again, I'd use protocol buffers, which are much, much more efficient. I use both Closure and JQuery on a daily basis; I consider them as occupying different niches, and wrote a bit more about that last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758317 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758317
  - DennisP 15y ago
    Interesting, thanks.

by andos 15y ago

DennisP 15y ago

Here's an ex-Google engineer who thinks Google's software infrastructure is obsolete, compared to opensource offerings: http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye http://rethrick.com/#waving-goodbye

nostrademons 15y ago
When this was discussed on Quora, a bunch of other Googlers chimed in and said basically "no, not really": http://www.quora.com/Google/Is-Googles-software-infrastructure-obsolete http://www.quora.com/Google/Is-Googles-software-infrastructu... I wasn't one of them, but I agree. Google's internal infrastructure has its warts, but it's generally light years more stable and reliable than anything you can get open-source. I have a teammate that worked with Hadoop in previous jobs; he said that there's no comparison between it and MapReduce. I used JSON for my previous startup's core data storage; were I to do it over again, I'd use protocol buffers, which are much, much more efficient. I use both Closure and JQuery on a daily basis; I consider them as occupying different niches, and wrote a bit more about that last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758317 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758317
- DennisP 15y ago
  Interesting, thanks.