The problem with using technology X “because Google does it” or “this is the best open source version of what Google uses, so let’s use it because Google does i

The problem with using technology X “because Google does it” or “this is the best open source version of what Google uses, so let’s use it because Google does it” is that companies neglect that Google does not just use the technology out of the box they 1. created the software for their own needs 2. maintain a developer team to improve it and address requirements/pain points/integration 3. have an internal pool of experts in the form of the developer team and “customers”/early adopters 4. most likely have other proprietary systems like Borg or Colossus which integrate with the software very well, which OSS like Hadoop may not (another example: OSS Bazel vs Blaze+Forge+Piper+Monorepo structure). Something like HDFS was hugely painful for many teams because they had no idea how it worked or how to debug it, had no idea how to fix it or extend it, and didn’t have any good tooling to understand why something was slow. All they could do was try to configure it, integrate with it, and find answers for their problems online. That’s because HDFS was “free” but a team capable of properly maintaining, supporting/operations, and developing HDFS was extremely expensive.