Protobufs were invented for Stubby, the RPC layer which is apparently used for absolutely everything inside Google. It's existed since at least 2001, and uses protobufs as the RPC serialization. gRPC is based on Stubby (though not the actual implementation).
Yeah. Google is actually a much better example of this mentality than Amazon is, if I'm reading the thread right. Google Cloud isn't behind AWS because of some service architecture nonsense. It's behind because Google started later, and it started later because for the longest time (I was there) the senior management had the following attitude:
"Why would we sell our cloud platform? We can always make more money and have higher leverage by running our own services on it and monetising with ads; merely selling hardware and software services is a comparatively uninteresting and low margin business."
Selling Google's platform (and it really is a platform) is an obvious idea that occurred to everyone who was there. It didn't happen because of explicit executive decision, not because Bezos was some kind of savant.
I think Google could have really dominated the cloud space if they'd been a bit more strategic. The problems were all cultural, not technological. For instance they are culturally averse to trusted partnerships of any kind (not just Google of course, that's a tech industry thing). There are only two levels of trust:
- Internal employee, nearly fully trusted.
- External person or firm, assumed to be a highly skilled malicious attacker
There's nothing in between. So if your infrastructure can't handle the most sophisticated attack you can think of, it can't be externalised at all. If it can't scale automatically to a million customers overnight, it can't be externalised at all.
There's really no notion in Google's culture of "maybe we should manually vet companies and give them slightly lower trust levels than our employees in return for money". It's seen as too labour intensive and not scalable enough to be interesting. But it'd have allowed them to dominate cloud technology years earlier than AWS or Azure.
