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> I will say that it does show a vote of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads use GCP infra, I'm not sure? I guess I'm mostly not sure what "gcp infr

by dmoy 3y ago

> I will say that it does show a vote of confidence to say that Photos, Gmail and Ads use GCP infra, I'm not sure? I guess I'm mostly not sure what "gcp infra" means there. The blog post says "Spanner is used ubiquitously inside of Google, supporting services such as; Ads, Gmail and Photos." But there's google-internal spanner, and gcp spanner. A service using spanner at Google isn't necessarily using gcp. (No clue about photos, Gmail, etc) Granted, from what I gather, there's a lot more similarity between spanner & gcp spanner than e.g. borg and kubernetes.

gregdoesit 3y ago
Surely in a post about Google Cloud Spanner, all examples mentioned use Google Cloud Spanner? It would be moot listing them as examples if they would not: so my assumption is they are all using GCP infra already for Spanner. I really want to give Google the benefit of the doubt: but it doesn't help that they did not write that eg Gmail is using "Cloud Spanner." They wrote that it uses Spanner.
- alisonkisk 3y ago
  [dead]
- ericpauley 3y ago
  This is putting a lot of faith in GCP advertising. I strongly doubt the idea that the Google workloads discussed are deployed on GCP instead of internal Borg infrastructure.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Considering that most of Google does not run on GCP, I would not give them the benefit of the doubt.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Years ago they did a reorg and moved all infrastructure services under Cloud even though they are not Cloud products. That would enable this kind of obfuscation because Cloud is literally responsible for both Cloud Spanner and non-Cloud Spanner and they can conflate these two in their marketing copy. They probably feel justified in doing so because they share so much code.
- GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
  Infra and Cloud Spanner are the same stack. Having those services run on infra is more about the legacy of tooling to shift it rather than anything around performance or ability to handle it
- blueg3 3y ago
  Photos, Gmail, and Ads use Spanner, not Cloud Spanner. Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.
bananapub 3y ago
borg and k8s are completely unrelated bits of software with roughly similar goals. gcp spanner and normal spanner are different deployments of the same code.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  >different deployments Which can be the difference between 99.99% availability and 99% availability with data corruption issues. Not saying that's the case here but one should not downplay the difference deployments can make.
GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
Infra and Cloud Spanner are the same stack. Having those services run on infra is more about the legacy of tooling to shift it rather than anything around performance or ability to handle it.

by dmoy 3y ago

gregdoesit 3y ago

Surely in a post about Google Cloud Spanner, all examples mentioned use Google Cloud Spanner? It would be moot listing them as examples if they would not: so my assumption is they are all using GCP infra already for Spanner. I really want to give Google the benefit of the doubt: but it doesn't help that they did not write that eg Gmail is using "Cloud Spanner." They wrote that it uses Spanner.

alisonkisk 3y ago
[dead]
ericpauley 3y ago
This is putting a lot of faith in GCP advertising. I strongly doubt the idea that the Google workloads discussed are deployed on GCP instead of internal Borg infrastructure.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Considering that most of Google does not run on GCP, I would not give them the benefit of the doubt.
kccqzy 3y ago
Years ago they did a reorg and moved all infrastructure services under Cloud even though they are not Cloud products. That would enable this kind of obfuscation because Cloud is literally responsible for both Cloud Spanner and non-Cloud Spanner and they can conflate these two in their marketing copy. They probably feel justified in doing so because they share so much code.
GabeWeiss_ 3y ago
Infra and Cloud Spanner are the same stack. Having those services run on infra is more about the legacy of tooling to shift it rather than anything around performance or ability to handle it
blueg3 3y ago
Photos, Gmail, and Ads use Spanner, not Cloud Spanner. Apparently Cloud Spanner doesn't support protobuf columns? It would be hard for any internal Google product to use it under that restriction.

bananapub 3y ago

borg and k8s are completely unrelated bits of software with roughly similar goals. gcp spanner and normal spanner are different deployments of the same code.

marcinzm 3y ago
>different deployments Which can be the difference between 99.99% availability and 99% availability with data corruption issues. Not saying that's the case here but one should not downplay the difference deployments can make.

GabeWeiss_ 3y ago

Infra and Cloud Spanner are the same stack. Having those services run on infra is more about the legacy of tooling to shift it rather than anything around performance or ability to handle it.