Didn't even see this on HN. Here's the reply I left on your blog.
As someone who worked in the SRE and datacenter/cluster management teams during the same period you were there (2005-2010), I can confidently say that I agree with almost everything you’ve mentioned. If you think engineers on small projects have a hard time dealing with acquiring and managing cluster resources, try being on the team that has to resolve all of those requests. Because many of Google’s core infrastructure pieces are so inflexible and frankly not designed to be used as they are, they end up dying a death of a thousand cuts. Systemic design flaws lead to telling most teams “no” when they asked for even 5 machines worth of resources.
At the end of the day, Google has maybe 5 products that generate 99% of the revenue and operate at huge scale. Should they devote most of their attention and money to these products? Absolutely. Should they do this at the expense of all the small projects? Not if Larry wants the company to act like a startup.
Ultimately the limiting factor to Google’s agility will be its technology infrastructure, not its engineers.
Ultimately the limiting factor to Google’s agility will be its technology infrastructure, not its engineers.
Isn't that a contradiction? It's the engineers who build the infrastructure. As such I would expect them to be the bottleneck, just like in every other company that has an effectively unlimited hardware budget.
As someone who worked in the SRE and datacenter/cluster management teams during the same period you were there (2005-2010), I can confidently say that I agree with almost everything you’ve mentioned. If you think engineers on small projects have a hard time dealing with acquiring and managing cluster resources, try being on the team that has to resolve all of those requests. Because many of Google’s core infrastructure pieces are so inflexible and frankly not designed to be used as they are, they end up dying a death of a thousand cuts. Systemic design flaws lead to telling most teams “no” when they asked for even 5 machines worth of resources.
At the end of the day, Google has maybe 5 products that generate 99% of the revenue and operate at huge scale. Should they devote most of their attention and money to these products? Absolutely. Should they do this at the expense of all the small projects? Not if Larry wants the company to act like a startup.
Ultimately the limiting factor to Google’s agility will be its technology infrastructure, not its engineers.