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.../...As Lambert point out, building and running such a system requires not only know-how but enormous amounts of computing power. Piper spans about 85 terabytes of data (aka 85,000 gigabytes), and Google’s 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits (changes) to the repository each day. That’s some serious activity. While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week.
At the same time, Piper must work to remove much of the burden from human coders. It must ensure that humans can wrap their heads around all that code; that they don’t step on each other’s toes with code changes; that they can readily remove bugs and unused code from the repository. And because all of this is so difficult, it must actually take some of that work away from the humans. Now that Google has switched to Piper from its previous version control system—a tool called Perforce—automated ‘bots handle a majority of the commits.
This doesn’t mean ‘bots are writing code. But they are generating a lot of the data and configuration files needed to run the company’s software. “You need to make a concerted effort to maintain code health,” Potvin says. “And this is not just humans maintaining code health, but robots too.”
2 Billion lines of code for 7.3 Billion humans. 45000 commits a day, handled by bots. When code health becomes as important (critical ?) than people's health. Very interesting "paper" anyway if you want to think "at scale".