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It's practically impossible to spin stuff out of Google because of interdependencies with the rest of google3 (the monorepo), not to mention assumptions about infrastructure. You might as well completely rebuild the entire thing from scratch.


The infrastructure problem is funny because this wouldn't be a problem if Google would use GCP by themselves. They should also be smart enough to create an export function for google3.


There's a fun problem with this.

No other company in the world has workloads that match Google's. So there are two options. You can spend a shitload of money making GCP actually work for the ridiculous needs of google3 applications and then actually get everybody to use GCP rather that using borg directly or you can not spend that money building all the infrastructure to do things that borg already does and has zero external customers.

Turns out the latter is attractive.


Will there ever be a google4?


No. The google3 path itself is baked into so many things that it would be a monumental task to move. There was an attempt in maybe 2010 or so but it was quickly abandoned. Things are 1000x worse now.

What Google does now is just not rev the version in any repo paths. This is true of several projects that previously had versions included in the path. Now all versioning is handled separately.




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