Colossus, on the other hand, is really good.
I've no idea what this is, but it sounds fascinating. Was this a way to auto-allocate more resource based on rules?
However Colossus _does_ run on the general Google compute infrastructure, and so needed a way to get CPU/RAM quota where none existed (because it was all used by existing, non-storage users).
For all the cloud companies, "quota" is literally dollars. Bandwidth, memory, cpu, these are things they sell. So they are measured in money. The existing corporate budgetary process already manages dollars (indeed, that's its main function). If you want more of one of these things, you'll be displacing some customer who stood ready to pay for them (i.e. on the spot market), so you need to replace the revenue they were providing. Very straightforward.
What does google measure all these things in? Quotons? Where do quotons come from? When google becomes more profitable, does the Central Bank of Quoton print more quotons each month than they had previously? Does Google have a Chief Quoton Officer?
Totally curious about this. Google is the only company operating on this scale that doesn't sell raw bandwidth/cpu/ram as their product, nor do they buy these things from underlying cloud vendors (like e.g. Cloudflare does). This makes a lot of things simpler internally and probably avoids a lot of internal conflicts, but it does mean that they have to have a parallel internal accounting system for this stuff.
Is there an official exchange rate between the two accounting systems? Are different teams allowed to sell each other quotons, in exchange for budget dollars? Has the IRS ever audited Google's Quoton books?
Okay that last question was not serious. But the rest were.
But how do they decide when to expand a datacenter or build a new one?
The demand is priced in quotons but the costs are in dollars.
Somebody somewhere at google must be maintaining a quoton/dollar exchange rate. It's weird that it's hidden from the rest of the company.
> so internal teams can be compared with a common currency
What's wrong with comparing them using dollars (or euros or whatever) as the currency? That's what Google's revenues are measured in terms of. If the price of electricity doubles (like it has in the EU) a team with euro-constant revenues could swing from being highly profitable to a massive loss... and nobody would notice because quotons conceal the cost of electricity.