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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

> Google has worked this way since time immemorial.

Do internal Google services exclusively use the Google Cloud Platform APIs? The implication is that internal Amazon services exclusively use AWS APIs. I've never worked at either company though, so I don't know if it's true. Perhaps someone could clarify.

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No, because internal APIs for the same backends are more powerful and easier to integrate with. It's not easy to make the external APIs as useful and powerful as internal ones: for one, you can trust your users more to do the right thing and not try to exploit you for profit, it's much less committment to offer certain functionalities, since it's easier to roll them back if only users are internal, etc. Google is slowly getting there in feature parity, but so much effort has been invested in Google internal ecosystem even before GCP has even existed that, as good as GCP is, nobody wants to bet on it when obviously superior alternative is available.

> for one, you can trust your users more to do the right thing and not try to exploit you for profit, it's much less committment to offer certain functionalities, since it's easier to roll them back if only users are internal,

"Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers."

- from Steve Yegge's Platforms Rant[1]

1. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Define "nobody." If you check earnings you'll be surprised to see GCP is quickly growing, even if it is a few years behind AWS. For large customers, their deployments are increasingly becoming platform agnostic, meaning they shop for price, not platform. Yegge's post, while relevant to almost every cloud customer at the time, is less relevant to large customers that can avoid lock-in today.

I am talking about people working inside Google, not customers, as should be apparent from context.

> The implication is that internal Amazon services exclusively use AWS APIs.

Untrue. Some even use older version of AWS "core" services (S3), not the latest and greatest version of AWS services.

though in some cases I can think of, the "legacy" service is now just a facade over an AWS service.

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