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Software Development: Google’s Code Base Spans More than 2 Billion Lines
Google online services are powered by more than two billion lines of code, says Rachel Potvin, Google executive. The services include things like search, maps, Google+, calendar, Gmail and YouTube. All that code is stored in a single repository and available to all of Google’s 25,000 engineers.
The source repository used by Google is proprietary, but there are similarities between it and how GitHub works. The version control system is called Piper. Unlike repositories like GitHub which house many many individual projects, the Google repository is structured like one massive project. It’s possible to share code across any number of projects. Piper also heavily uses automation to monitor consistency and ‘code health’.
Sam Lambert, the director of systems at GitHub, commented on Wired that, “having 25,000 developers, as Google does, means it’s sharing code with a diverse set of people with diverse set of skills. But, as a small company, you can get some of that same advantage using GitHub and open source. There’s that saying: ‘A rising tide raises all boats.’”
How much storage space do you need to store and version control two billion lines of code. Google uses about 85 terabytes of storage space and the 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits to the repository every day.
It’s interesting to compare the size of Google’s repository to other code bases, like Linux or the Windows OS. Linux is only 15 million lines and Windows is about 50 million. 15 million lines of code is about how much code is touched by Google engineers every week.
