Of course restricting rollout to American university emails (including alumni addresses--at least at one point) was also a pretty natural consequence of Facebook's origins.
The attitude within SRE toward Orkut (the product) was one of disdain if not contempt. A healthy culture does not treat rapidly growing products this way.
Re:The Evolution of SRE at Google
by mike_hearn on Saturday January 04, 2025 @02:38PM
(#42597096)
I mean, I'm personal friends with a former Orkut SRE. The idea that Google SRE ignored or disdained Orkut just isn't right. Nonetheless, if your job is defined as "make the site reliable" and it's written in a way that can never be reliable then it's understandable that you're going to have at least some frustrations.
The reason it was not regarded as 'production ready' was that the architecture didn't scale. In fact it also didn't run on the regular Google infrastructure that everything else used and that SRE teams were familiar with; it was a .NET app that used MS SQL Server.
This design wasn't a big surprise. Facebook won not because Orkut lost but because Facebook were the first to manage gradual scaleup without killing their own adoption, by figuring out naturally isolated social networks they could restrict signup to (American universities). This made their sharding problem much easier. Every other competitor tried to let the whole world sign up simultaneously whilst also offering sophisticated data model features like the ability to make arbitrary friendships and groups, which was hard to implement with the RDBMS tech of the time.
Orkut did indeed suffer drastic scaling problems and eventually had to be rewritten on top of the regular Google infrastructure, but that just replaced one set of problems with another.