Isn't *this...common? IaaS is good practice these days. I work at an eCommerce co and we do this as well.

Perhaps, but what's notable about Google is the extent to which everything is a text config file, and the fact that everything is in a monorepo.

As an example that surprised me, even our oncall rotations are kept in a text file along with a list of upcoming assignments. The rotation tool checks out that file and appends the next few names in the list to the end of that file to prepare the "calendar" for the coming weeks.

Unsurprisingly, this reminds me of upstream Kubernetes where code reviewers/approvers and project maintainers are all just text files named OWNERS, and the tools just read the files to enforce the rules. Very simple and elegant!

That’s a google-introduced thing :)

Yeah, which is why I said it’s unsurprising. I imagine Kubernetes gives you a glimpse of what development processes at Google is like.

That fact was pretty useful when making the tooling that ensures that xooglers are not on-call in the future. Please don't ask me how I know.

Yes, but on the other of the spectrum, GCL itself has turned into another half baked programming language. Editing these configs is the bane of my life.

GCL is the thing I was looking forward to never seeing when I left Google. Now, GCL is one of the things I actually miss.

Pretty much all other "configure things that are at least moderately complex" are actually bad enough that it makes GCL/BCL look like a really good idea.

The company I work for uses Google Calendar, which is worse in every way than the approach used at Google for calendaring.

What does google use for calendaring?

Google Calendar.

Good practice, yes. Common... it depends.