> Google has been practicing ITIL, Borg comes out as a result, Having been a member of the team that built Borg, I can assure you that those two things were un

> Google has been practicing ITIL, Borg comes out as a result, Having been a member of the team that built Borg, I can assure you that those two things were unrelated. I can't say for sure whether the initial idea/impetus for Borg came from the management or the developer side, but once the project was started it was very much engineer-driven, and pretty organically so. The Infrastructure team at Google at the time (of which Borg was a part, along with several other related cloud projects) had a single manager for what grew to eventually 100+ engineers (mostly senior/staff level, and highly independent) before Google started creating/hiring managers more aggressively, so we were pretty much self-managing. The design and implementation of Borg was horizontal, both within the team, and coordinating with engineers (developers and operations teams) that would actually need to use the system. I'd say it was at least three years in before management really got involved in design decisions, by which time Borg was running most of Google's production services It was a bit of a Wild West, but compared to some later major from-scratch design/development projects I've been involved in since, it was a Belle Époque.