Potvin

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  • Google's codebase is ludicrously huge for good reason

    by 
    Andrew Tarantola
    Andrew Tarantola
    09.18.2015

    Google's codebase -- the programming instructions that run every one of its services from Gmail to Slides -- span a whopping 2 billion lines of code that stretch across 1 billion files and require 86 terabytes of storage, according to Google engineering manager Rachel Potvin. She recently disclosed those figures at the @Scale engineering conference. She also noted that this massive collection of data is mirrored and continually updated in ten data centers peppered around the globe. "Not only is the size of the repository increasing," Potvin explained during her lecture, "but the rate of change is also increasing. This is an exponential curve."