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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

Given the discontinuance of the Google search appliance, I would be reluctant to consider any Google hardware. I’d likely use something like PCF on owned hardware for the scenarios they describe.

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The customer is the DoD. They know how to negotiate contracts to cover this scenario and have the clout to negotiate such and enforce it.

And they’ll likely have a “this need to be supported for 50 years” provision too

The Google Search Appliance was available from 2002 to 2019, which is a pretty decent run for a piece of IT hardware. Especially given that the average office environment looked quite different in 2002: the GSA was designed for indexing intranets (remember those?) and did not require any Internet connectivity at all.

>the GSA was designed for indexing intranets (remember those?)

Yet the problem of being able to find things still exists. That my "intranet" consists now of a bunch of cloud services accessible to the internet makes no functional difference.

If it's accessible to the Internet, Google can make a private index for you with Cloud Search and you don't need a physical appliance.

https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_au/products/cloud-searc...

That doesn't read like it can login to anything other than Google services. Those internet intranets typically sit behind some kind of authentication.

Does Cloud Search support third-party data?

Yes, Cloud Search includes connectors to third-party data sources, such as Salesforce, SAP and more than 100 others.

Well, Google already distribute hardware to various ISP - it's called GGC (https://www.gstatic.com/isp/docs/ggc-installation.pdf?sjid=5...).

We (GSA) & GGC used to source our hardware from the same supplier (Dell).

Only part of the GGC fleet are Dell machines (that pdf lists Dell, HP, and Equus). Paraphrasing one of the leads from some years back: "Single-vendor is not a vendor strategy."

Between improved negotiating position and resilience to vendor-specific firmware bugs / vulnerabilities, the additional maintenance cost associated with supporting two or more platforms pays for itself very quickly.

In this particular case, they're the air-gapped product is singly dependent on HPE servers, mostly for compliance reasons. Same reason on why it uses Palo Alto firewalls.

Though in the case of the GGC nodes, having multiple vendors was mostly a negotiating component. If we could go to HO and order 3000 servers and have them running, Dell loses a large amount of negotiating power.

Being honest though, working with Dell was significantly better than working with HP or (especially) Equus.

Former Google Employee, on GGC.

HP!=HPE for over 8 years now

One of my previous jobs had this appliance back >10-15 years ago, and honestly I'm yet to come across anything which assists with internal content discovery quite as well. I really miss it! (Side note, Confluence search is awful)

We[0] have made this. Fully self-hosted. Confluence search is a particularly consistent pain point.

[0] atolio.com

This is very different. This is like if Anthos married a Toughbook. There are very real, very sticky use cases for this appliance.

I mean, the search appliance was discontinued after 17 years. Not sure it's that bad...

And they supported their last search appliance over 10 years and provided a transition path toward cloud-based alternative. This is probably better than usual industry cases and I'm pretty sure Google wouldn't get this bad reputation if they adopted this case as their own product longevity standard.

When would someone reach for PCF now instead of K8s?

Given what Broadcom did to almost all of VMWare's products, I'd be a lot more worried about PCF than really anything else.

There’s an opensource version of CloudFoundry. https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-deployment

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