41–50 of 91 posts
They've posted a number of interesting articles on the topic here, such as this one listing competing implementations (but 2y old): https://authzed.com/blog/zanzibar-implementations
The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees. This goes for ever…
When App Engine launched, that was great for me because I could write internal tools that were mostly off the treadmill. Unless you used one of App Engine's less-used API's (which themselves eventually got deprecated), your more obscure team-specific services could keep running.
So, lots of great technology is not necessarily great for productivity. I don't know what's happened since. I expected that launching Cloud would result in more mature infrastructure because external customers won't tolerate churn as much. I guess it's sort of true?
The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees. This goes for ever…
Most of that stuff is available to external users in Google Cloud; so why isn’t Google Cloud more popular? I don’t have hard numbers handy, but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare.
GCP has plenty of great tools, but it can also be quite awkward to use, and it’s lacking some useful stuff like lightweight edge functions.
Can anyone who's taken a close look at both Zanzibar and Amazon's IAM compare and contrast them?
Zanzibar is a Google-internal implementation of the concepts outlined in this paper, focused on managing authorization as a function of relationships between objects.
AWS IAM is primarily for AAA services with AWS, though you can use it with AWS Identity Center to provide SSO to other systems via IAM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees. This goes for ever…
I think that view might be a bit out of date. Most of that stuff is available to external users in Google Cloud; so why isn’t Google Cloud more popular? I don’t have hard numbers handy, but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare. GCP has plenty of great tools, but it can also be quite awkward to use, and it’s lacking some useful stuff like lightweight edge functions.
AWS has 1st mover advantage and the biggest ecosystem.
Azure has Microsoft behind it = everyone that used Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, C#, etc that wanted to move to the cloud.
Google doesn't have such a backing. Oracle cloud (huge growth) might be stronger in that sense.
[flagged]
This tired trope has jumped the shark with this comment. Not only is it off topic, but even if it did refer to an actual Google product, it's disingenuous because its only point was to be snarky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that view might be a bit out of date. Most of that stuff is available to external users in Google Cloud; so why isn’t Google Cloud more popular? I don’t have hard numbers handy, but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare. GCP has plenty of great tools, but it can also be quite awkward to use, and it’s lacking some useful stuff like lightweight edge functions.
> but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare AWS has 1st mover advantage and the biggest ecosystem. Azure has Microsoft behind it = everyone that used Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, C#, etc that wanted to move to the cloud. Google doesn't have such a backing. Oracle cloud (huge growth) might be stronger in that sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This tired trope has jumped the shark with this comment. Not only is it off topic, but even if it did refer to an actual Google product, it's disingenuous because its only point was to be snarky.
It's not disingenuous. Unless you've been living under a rock, Google has a very reliable track record of killing projects [0]. It's a very reasonable question. [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it seems to me that GCP is behind both AWS and Azure in terms of dev mindshare AWS has 1st mover advantage and the biggest ecosystem. Azure has Microsoft behind it = everyone that used Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, C#, etc that wanted to move to the cloud. Google doesn't have such a backing. Oracle cloud (huge growth) might be stronger in that sense.
I agree, but it’s surprising that things are that way, especially as they’re not short of cash. If they have this big tech edge over their competitors, where’s the benefit?
Most of it is behind huge paywalls compared to their competitors. There's e.g. no serverless version of spanner that is pay-per-usage. Same with Big Table. Even the newly released AlloyDB has a huge starting cost.
If no 1 knows and no 1 can feel for the advantage it doesn't really help.
The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees. This goes for ever…