News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place.

Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by kuschku on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:41PM (#10228391)
This explains quite some things.

Still, this is not a very forward-thinking solution. Building and combining microservices – effectively UNIX philosophy applied to the web – is the most effective way to make progress.

EDIT: Seems like I misunderstood the article – from the way I read it, it sounded like Google has a monolithic codebase, with heavily dependent products, deployed monolithically. As zaphar mentioned, it turns out this is just bad phrasing in the article and me misunderstanding that phrasing.

I take everything back I said and claim the opposite.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by thomashabets2 on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @01:51PM (#10228461)
That's why Google is so unsuccessful at scaling technical solutions, unlike you they're not forward-thinking.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by kuschku on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:10PM (#10228587)
No, it’s not that they are unsuccessful, it’s that they are unable to maintain it properly. Already today they have tons of open security issues.

Or think about April 1st, when they set a Access-Control-Location: * header on google.com because someone wrote the com.google easteregg.

Read the post from the SoundCloud dude from yesterday to find out how to do software management properly (hint: modularization is everything)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by cwyers on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:31PM (#10228736)
Yes, I'm sure Google has a lot to learn from SoundCloud about how to deploy software at scale, like that time NASA got advice from Estes Industries on how to launch rockets.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by captn3m0 on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:29PM (#10228722)
Do you have a source for the easter egg security issue? Haven't read about it anywhere, and can't seem to find anything either.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by kuschku on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:34PM (#10228757)
Here is one: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/no-joke-googles-apri...

The issue was that they wanted to load the page – with the user logged in, etc – on com.google. For this they implemented an explicit URL parameter that would allow this.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by magicalist on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @04:08PM (#10229471)
> Attackers could have seized on the omission of the X-Frame-Options header to change a user's search settings, including turning off SafeSearch filters

The horror!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by t0mk on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:22PM (#10228665)
link to the post?

Neither HN search nor Google search show anything to "modularization is everything".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by DanBC on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:25PM (#10228687)
Perhaps this?

http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_micro...?

(That question mark is part of the URL)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by kuschku on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:29PM (#10228725)
Yes, exactly.

It explains how even in a small company modularization can help extremely. Now look at Google, where some issues (like the google.com april 1st XSS issue) were only fixed after outsiders mentioned it.

Usually internally the team responsible for that part should have cought that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by bitmapbrother on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @05:19PM (#10229966)
Why don't you list those "tons of open security issues" ?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by zaphar on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:28PM (#10228717)
Google runs practically everything internally as services. Nothing about the code repository makes it impossible to run microservices. Where did you get the idea that google runs a single monolithic app for everything?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by kuschku on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:32PM (#10228744)
The article claimed the code, and they way it's run, is a monolithically developed and deployed product.

If that’s not the case, I apologize for misunderstanding it.

But if it was the case, I wanted to state that it might not be wise, for the same reasons as this thread mentioned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10195423

EDIT: Thanks for telling me, though! Always nice to be proven wrong, as at least I learnt something today :D

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by Filligree on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:49PM (#10228845)
It's not the case.

You should think of Piper as a single filesystem which permits atomic multi-file edits. And that's about it; there's nothing in that which forces any particular release structure on you.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place by spectral321 on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:50PM (#10228860)
The talk did mention (briefly) that monolithic codebase and monolithic binaries/software aren't strictly related. It's likely that monolithic software is easier in a monolithic codebase, but I don't think that microservices are harder in a monolithic codebase. Yes, we tend to statically link, but that's for library dependencies (i.e. things like the protocol buffers libraries/definitions). I don't work at all in this area, so this is a guess, but I imagine that it's extremely rare for unrelated teams to have application logic linked into the same binary - just making a release would involve coordination from so many teams :)
[ Parent | on HN ]