The scale of the diagram, though obviously a diagram of that scale can only be drawn for an organization with operations at that scale - so kind of both. I've

The scale of the diagram, though obviously a diagram of that scale can only be drawn for an organization with operations at that scale - so kind of both. I've mostly done backend/data stuff at Google, so I can't speak to traditional web dev decisions, but I've written design docs which discuss the tradeoffs between using Bigtable and Spanner, or Flume vs. Mapreduce, or one serving strategy vs. another, for some specific thing. Maybe those choices are vaguely analogous to choosing between Postgres or Mongo, nginx or Apache, etc. I imagine the guys who write webapps (not Search, obviously, but internal apps or things like our help pages) consider whether to use App Engine, Angular, Django, etc. on a per-app basis.