Comment by throwawaygoog10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaygoog10 | Hacker News Reader

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throwawaygoog10

I'm sorry your efforts failed internally. Our infrastructure is somewhat ossified these days: the new and exotic are not well accepted. Other than Spanner (which is still working to replace Bigtable), I can't think of a ton of really novel infrastructure that exists now and didn't when you were around. I mean, we don't even do a lot of generic distributed graph processing anymore. Pregel is dead, long live processing everything on a single task with lots of RAM.

I suspect your project would have been really powerful had you gotten the support you needed, but without a (6) or a (7) next to your name it's really hard to convince people of that. I know a number of PAs that would benefit now from structuring their problems in a graph store with arbitrary-depth joins and transactions. I work on one of those and cringe at some of the solutions we've made.

We've forgotten what it's like to need novel solutions to performance problems. Instead, we have services we just throw more RAM at. Ganpati is over 128GB (it might even be more) of RAM now, I suspect a solution like dgraph could solve its problems much more efficiently not to mention scalably.

Good on you for taking your ideas to market. I'm excited to see how your solution evolves.

One of the TLs was a T7. Got overruled by T8 :-).

As Google is growing, there are many T7s around. So, you really need T8 and above to actually get something out of the door, when it comes to impacting web search.

P.S. Dgraph is Apache license, written in Go/Protobufs/Grpc. Google might have an appetite for that, worth pushing internally. https://github.com/dgraph-io/dgraph

My understanding is that by default, dgraph query responses are in json. Is it possible to get gRPC responses instead?

Dgraph exposes both HTTP endpoint and gRPC endpoint. All our official clients use the gRPC endpoint, including Go, Java, NodeJS client.

https://docs.dgraph.io/deploy#ports-usage

> Our infrastructure is somewhat ossified these days: the new and exotic are not well accepted

I think that's rather uncharitable. I work in T.I. and while I can't namedrop a number of internal projects I can assure you there's a lot of deep innovation happening in our corner. Are they poised to get Spanner-esque adoption across the whole company? Unlikely. But it's unfair to knock the infrastructure and assume we're way past some innovation renaissance.

> Our infrastructure is somewhat ossified these days: the new and exotic are not well accepted.

I know that it does not involve storage, but Tensorflow is a purely infrastructure project. And it's certainly newer than the Freebase story.

And that has backing from Jeff Dean. Which underscores point mentioned elsewhere in this thread and TFA - with right kind of political backing, you can do wonders.

What's "Ganpati" ?

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