I've even written a few libraries like that, and still stuff out there isn't that good or does not exist years later, because it's too niche, yet still a generic issue in the industry. Can't open source it although.

In an alternative timeline, Buck for example could of been the OSS solution that google decided to devote their resources to, and then in the end it would of been a good idea that FB created their own version of it.

Mind you, Kubernetes was originally made written at Google by engineers that previously worked on Borg. So they will naturally design it to address problems with Borg. Kubernetes’s original project code name was “Seven of Nine”, because Seven of Nine is a friendlier Borg.

I particularly can't agree that k8s is a necessarily friendlier Borg. Borg is on rails; there are fewer choices for the user to make. K8s tries to be flexible enough to be used in various production environments, which leads to it being harder to use rather than easier.

Sometimes you also get issues on k8s where a google engineer responds "it's not done yet because we really, really don't want to repeat what a fiasco it was under Borg".

So I'd say it might be better even in direct comparison ;)

Google has enough project churn internally that services and programs do stand a good chance of getting replaced, though. There’s plenty of history.

If Google made a good build system with features not available in open source, eventually open-sourced it, continue to use it, and lots of other people are eager to use it, how does that demonstrate that they shouldn't have invented a build system?

“Problem with X” is not the same thing as “you should not do X”.

I’m also not getting why you think that I’m ignorant of Bazel’s origins, specifically, since I was talking about Borg.

Regarding Borg vs k8s, it's worth noting that k8s was never built to replace Borg or to even try to match the feature set of Borg. There are some nice things about k8s (like the ease of running an entire cluster on your local machine), but since k8s tries to be all things to all people it's not even close to being viable (or competitive with what Borg can do) for Google itself.