And there's no reason why a small project should not. But nobody is going to move, say, indexing to GCP. And when it comes to power laws the big things are big and the small things are not.
This sounds like a No True Scotsman argument to me, that if something runs on GCP instead of Borg, it isn't "real". Also throw in shades of moving goalposts.
Indexing doesn't run on GCP primarily because it's legacy (as in, the first product Google ever did) and thus long predates GCP itself.
It’s neither of those fallacies. The fallacy is to suppose that if you know several people using technology X then it must be quite popular. We see this all the time on HN where people suppose that, say, Erlang is quite popular because there are dozens of companies, each with five engineers, using it. But then we ignore that there are five companies with a hundred thousand engineers each that do everything in c++. It’s the same with these other things. It’s quite like that K8s satisfies the requirements of 80% of the projects at Google and it’s also quite likely that all of them put together consume 1% of the production resources, so it leads to the question of whether it’s even capable of solving a really large problem, as mehrdada argues elsewhere in this thread.
It's not a Google product obviously, but Snapchat runs on GCP. That's quite big. Is that not a "real" product? Admittedly they're on App Engine, a much older product than Kubernetes, but I suspect they'd be able to run on Kubernetes, and perhaps that's what they would choose if they were to build from scratch right now.
Indexing has been rewritten many times over. Even if you removed all the dependencies on Bigtable and co., I think indexing would be the last to move, for quite practical reasons, due to its sheer size and design. The parent poster picked probably the worst workload to migrate to public GCP. Gmail, YouTube and search serving are easier in comparison.
