1. everything works reasonably well together and share the same cross cutting primitives (IAM, VPC).
2. you have service teams and support all under the same roof, so you get deep access to them and can get them to work together on solving your problem
3. you do not get a choice in the matter, so you do not have to waste time deliberating the choice. you also get rock bottom prices guaranteed.
this all made things much simpler to work with, much simpler to debug/get support for, and removed a lot of the churn we would've had if we had to re-evaluate services every N years.
Not really. There are many competing tools internally too, and you have to choose the appropriate one. One thing that's common though is they all integrate with everything else - monitoring, building, launching, codebase, documentation, etc. This makes it much easier to just make it work.
I frequently talk to my friend about work, and I realize most of the problems they face - even at good tech companies - are something I never have to think about. I don't mean the actually difficult problems which any Software Engineer would love to tackle, but the grungy ones.
I went from startup world (mostly rails and frontend frameworks of the early teens) early in my career to google3 for about half a decade to the whole suite of public cloud stuff starting about a year ago and I really miss google's internal tooling.
It's not at all that any given component is much or at all better than any given public competitor. Indeed I think the article is right that on an individual component basis there are strong competitors to everything google has internally. But taken as a whole, I found it much easier to figure out what tool to use for a given job and get it working well for my task within google than it is with all the public tools. But it's an integration and analysis paralysis / paradox of choice and sales cycle problem, rather than a technical problem.
Do I go with a fully managed service or self-host? How well does the self-hosting work with my infrastructure? What about cost comparisons? Do these three tools work together at all? Do they support my particular sso setup? It's just so much crap before even getting to the point where the technical capabilities are important. And it is either prohibitively time consuming or just actually impossible to do any sort of objective analysis of different options, so everyone just guesses and cargo cults. "This seems to have the most mindshare in the community."
I experienced variants of some of these same problems with google internal tools, but there were easy and good answers to a large enough set of the questions that it always seemed a lot easier to get an answer and move on.