6 ms·

It happened in the PHP community as well, facebook being the poster child, but Yahoo also had a fair number of internal optimizations and I saw a few other comp

It happened in the PHP community as well, facebook being the poster child, but Yahoo also had a fair number of internal optimizations and I saw a few other companies tweak their way to get better perf/security. Then comes a point where the community catches on and has bigger momentum than the company, so it makes sense to move to the standard implementation. I'd kinda see Google's Borg -> k8s move as slightly similar, though they're the one inviting the community around the standard they built themselves.

the_duke 2y ago
Isn't FB/Meta still on Hack + HVVM?
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  They are. At this point it's a completely different language with its own stack, as far as I know that will be a core component for the forseable future. Now they also have modern PHP and some other languages alongside with hack from what I understand.
  - rafark 2y ago
    It’s not completely different, it’s still mostly the same language with some big additions. If you read their dev blog, you’ll see they fixed a bug that was also present in php a few months ago.
  - phyrex 2y ago
    I don’t think there’s any vanilla php in use at meta
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      Don't know if it's vanilla, but there seems to be some: https://medium.com/@aarthimanikandan2006/does-facebook-still-use-php-unveiling-the-technology-behind-the-social-media-giant-6a0f0a7cb833 https://medium.com/@aarthimanikandan2006/does-facebook-still...
      - phyrex 2y ago
        That’s just some guy that asserts stuff though. I mean, so am I to you, but fwiw I’ve never seen or heard of any non-hack PHP in the current codebase
arnorhs 2y ago
That is an impressive misrepresentation of history. PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it. People here on HN kept talking php down. In 2014 FB made their own flavour of php with a bunch of perf features, called hack. Eventually a lot of the perf features hack made its way into php. FB is still on its own flavour. Php community is still dying.
- 59nadir 2y ago
  Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.
  - hparadiz 2y ago
    People hate php for no reason. They talk about performance or whatever while building rest crud apps. Literally any language can handle that easily and your bottleneck is usually the database. I've scaled startups on PHP to hundreds of thousands of users running on a few cheap ec2 instances. But no one wants to build new php projects instead focusing on Go, Python, or Ruby. I honestly don't get it. PHP devs earn less. The syntax is super easy to pick up. Don't you want cheaper labor? I've started to learn the ecosystems of the other languages. It's all the same shit. Really.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      I think php has a gentler learning curve, but you still need the same level of expertise to get something decent out of the door. From the recruiting side it's still a PITA to find good engineers and it's reflected in the final cost of hiring. I might be biased, but moving jobs every now and then had more impact than doing php or ruby (the other contender would be nodejs, I think go and python tend to be used on different purposes or complementary to the web stack)
    - iampims 2y ago
sakex 2y ago
I don't think Google uses K8s internally. Borg is still here though.
- sporkland 2y ago
  They run k8s on borg. From what I can tell as someone that worked a lot on early k8s and a large GCP customer they still use borg mostly internally. k8s is their path to creating cloud portability and neutralizing AWS "network" effects.
summerlight 2y ago
k8s is not allowed to use in the most projects utilizing the internal stack, at least yet. In fact, it hasn't reached to the feature parity level necessary to replace any big projects running on Borg.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  If other companies can run big projects on Kubernetes, so can Google.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    Im sorry but this statement is pretty funny to anyone who has seen google’s internal infra. Where are those companies who run like 10-20k machine kubernetes clusters?
  - summerlight 2y ago
    If you genuinely believe that you have better understanding on how Google's internal infrastructure is running, you should be able to provide better evidence than "other companies can do".

the_duke 2y ago

Isn't FB/Meta still on Hack + HVVM?

makeitdouble 2y ago
They are. At this point it's a completely different language with its own stack, as far as I know that will be a core component for the forseable future. Now they also have modern PHP and some other languages alongside with hack from what I understand.
- rafark 2y ago
  It’s not completely different, it’s still mostly the same language with some big additions. If you read their dev blog, you’ll see they fixed a bug that was also present in php a few months ago.
- phyrex 2y ago
  I don’t think there’s any vanilla php in use at meta
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    Don't know if it's vanilla, but there seems to be some: https://medium.com/@aarthimanikandan2006/does-facebook-still-use-php-unveiling-the-technology-behind-the-social-media-giant-6a0f0a7cb833 https://medium.com/@aarthimanikandan2006/does-facebook-still...
    - phyrex 2y ago
      That’s just some guy that asserts stuff though. I mean, so am I to you, but fwiw I’ve never seen or heard of any non-hack PHP in the current codebase

arnorhs 2y ago

That is an impressive misrepresentation of history. PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it. People here on HN kept talking php down. In 2014 FB made their own flavour of php with a bunch of perf features, called hack. Eventually a lot of the perf features hack made its way into php. FB is still on its own flavour. Php community is still dying.

59nadir 2y ago
Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.
- hparadiz 2y ago
  People hate php for no reason. They talk about performance or whatever while building rest crud apps. Literally any language can handle that easily and your bottleneck is usually the database. I've scaled startups on PHP to hundreds of thousands of users running on a few cheap ec2 instances. But no one wants to build new php projects instead focusing on Go, Python, or Ruby. I honestly don't get it. PHP devs earn less. The syntax is super easy to pick up. Don't you want cheaper labor? I've started to learn the ecosystems of the other languages. It's all the same shit. Really.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    I think php has a gentler learning curve, but you still need the same level of expertise to get something decent out of the door. From the recruiting side it's still a PITA to find good engineers and it's reflected in the final cost of hiring. I might be biased, but moving jobs every now and then had more impact than doing php or ruby (the other contender would be nodejs, I think go and python tend to be used on different purposes or complementary to the web stack)
  - iampims 2y ago

sakex 2y ago

I don't think Google uses K8s internally. Borg is still here though.

sporkland 2y ago
They run k8s on borg. From what I can tell as someone that worked a lot on early k8s and a large GCP customer they still use borg mostly internally. k8s is their path to creating cloud portability and neutralizing AWS "network" effects.

summerlight 2y ago

k8s is not allowed to use in the most projects utilizing the internal stack, at least yet. In fact, it hasn't reached to the feature parity level necessary to replace any big projects running on Borg.

vbezhenar 2y ago
If other companies can run big projects on Kubernetes, so can Google.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Im sorry but this statement is pretty funny to anyone who has seen google’s internal infra. Where are those companies who run like 10-20k machine kubernetes clusters?
- summerlight 2y ago
  If you genuinely believe that you have better understanding on how Google's internal infrastructure is running, you should be able to provide better evidence than "other companies can do".