i wish google could authenticate my own sense of self worth, because then id save a lot on Therapy. :)
Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
51–60 of 137 posts
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand Google engineers are vendor-locked-in using Google specific tech one way or another.
Yeah the whole time I was there every time I had to use bigtable or Spanner I always muttered to myself “I wish I could be using some free software garbage instead of this proprietary Google stuff right now.” Every Googler secretly yearns for the performance, reliability, and elegance of MySQL.
You should add a /s to make this more obvious .
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#53Why is it called Zanzibar though? I'm kind of intrigued
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand Google engineers are vendor-locked-in using Google specific tech one way or another.
Yeah the whole time I was there every time I had to use bigtable or Spanner I always muttered to myself “I wish I could be using some free software garbage instead of this proprietary Google stuff right now.” Every Googler secretly yearns for the performance, reliability, and elegance of MySQL.
To be fair, quite a few engineers at Google did yearn for MySQL and a single instance at that. Not for any of the traits you list°, but because it would have let them no longer worry about HA, replication, request hedging, key hotspots, etc. It would have also meant not having a product that works when there are more than a handful of users, but that's another story. BT was a lot of work to write for and that's why Spanner evolved the way it did.
°I sense some irony
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#55> There's also a story behind that project name. That is not the original project name. The original project name was force-removed by my SVP. Once my hands are free again, I can explain https://mobile.twitter.com/LeaKissner/status/113663143751427...
https://twitter.com/LeaKissner/status/1136691523104280576
> Zanzibar was not the original name of the system. It was originally called "Spice". I have read Dune more times than I can count and an access control system is designed so that people can safely share things, so the project motto was "the shares must flow"
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#56Why is it called Zanzibar though? I'm kind of intrigued
There's another thread about naming it - https://twitter.com/LeaKissner/status/1136691523104280576
The original name was Spice, which was nixed from a higher-up; they went to Zanzibar, one of the Spice Islands.
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#57I love reading about Google's systems, but I wish I could work on those problems at scale, that is my dream really. I wonder what more systems Google has that we don't know about. I know Borg has become what we know as k8s but surely there must be more things that Google has made internally that are not open source. Curious about this and would like to know more about it from anyone in the trenches at Google.
> I love reading about Google's systems, but I wish I could work on those problems at scale, that is my dream really. I wonder what more systems Google has that we don't know about. I work for Google and I used to have this exact thought too. I think the reality is not quite as rosy, though far from bad! You have to realize that there are hundreds of people who work on systems like this, and as a consequence, your da…
> there's no special wisdom and instead they just have more powerful primitives/tools to work with
Reminds me of compound interests. Google operates at a scale where the company has enough brainpower to design systems like GFS/Colossus and Borg, which enable systems like Spanner, which enable systems like Zanzibar, and so on.
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand Google engineers are vendor-locked-in using Google specific tech one way or another.
Yeah the whole time I was there every time I had to use bigtable or Spanner I always muttered to myself “I wish I could be using some free software garbage instead of this proprietary Google stuff right now.” Every Googler secretly yearns for the performance, reliability, and elegance of MySQL.
Uncool, given that Google only exist thanks to free software.
Google started as a C, Java and Python shops. Android is born out of a Linux Kernel.
If I remember well, long ago, the initial database they used was actually an in-shop fork of MySQL.
Easy to say bad things about free software now that you have billions and hundred of geniuses to work on your own stuff.
Actually, this kind of comment reminds me of the "linux is cancer" era of Microsoft. Funny like Google is now becoming the new MS now they got all the markets, while MS pretend to be nice now that they are not the top dog anymore.
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#59What's interesting to me here is not the ACL thing, it's how in a way 'straight forward' this all seems to be. It's the large architecture of a fairly basic system, done I supposed 'professionally'. I'm curious to know how this works organizationally. What kind of architects involved because this system would have to interact with any number of others, so how do they do requirements gathering? Do they just 'have expe…
Especially at Google, you first see the same problem appearing and getting solved in multiple products, then someone tries to come up with a more generic solution that works for most projects and, just as importantly, can serve more traffic than the existing solutions. Having to rewrite things on a regular basis because of growth is painful, but can also be a blessing in disguise.
Who that someone is who works on the generic solution, can vary. Sometimes it's one or more of the teams already mentioned. Sometimes, like in this case, it's someone with expertise in related areas that takes the initiative. And a project of this scope invariably gets reviewed on a regular basis by senior engineers, all the way to Urs (who leads all of technical infrastructure). Shared technologies require not just headcount to design and write the systems, but also to operate them (by SREs when they're large enough), so you need to get upper management involved as well.
Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This caching, along with aggressive pooling of read requests, allows Zanzibar to issue only 20 million read RPCs per second to Spanner." ("Only") I'm surprised by all the numbers they give out: latency, regions, operation counts, even servers. The typical Google paper omits numbers on the Y axis of its most interesting graphs. Or it says "more than a billion", which makes people think "2B", when the actual number mi…
Kind of needed in the cloud war where many actually question if the mysterious Google supermacy in global infrastructure is really true.
Throwing servers at the problem is less impressive then thinking very hard and solving it with less.