IDG News Service - Bucking the corporate practice of buying instead of building internally, Google's corporate IT department will typically build management software itself, or adopt an open source software package, before investigating the feasibility of purchasing proprietary software.
"In the long run, it is cheaper to build and not buy," said Justin McWilliams, a software engineer in Google's corporate engineering department, which provisions and manages computers and other technology for Google employees. McWilliams shared some of the company's practices at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), being held this week in Portland, Ore. "We typically don't default to buying a commercial offering. We think about building it from scratch first, or look to the open source world," he said.
Google uses a number of home-built or modified open source programs for IT management, including software for full disk encryption (FDE), remote computer management, compliance management, virtual private networks (VPN), video teleconferencing, and for single sign on (SSO).
Over the past few decades, IT departments at large organizations have learned to purchase commercial, off-the-shelf software to manage their infrastructure, typically because it is less expensive than writing and maintaining the software in-house. Due to a number of factors, however, this approach does not work well at Google, McWilliams explained.
"Even when we buy we still have to build on top of what we bought in order to be effective within Google. We want all of our systems to communicate with one another. Otherwise, we'd just have all these silos of data," McWilliams said. The cost of employing engineers to write and maintain code is still more cost-effective than maintaining costly support contracts with IT management software providers, McWilliams said.
One key reason behind this build-first philosophy is that Google is a rapidly growing company. The company currently has over 32,000 employees, almost twice as many as it did in 2008. Because of this rapid growth, the company's IT staff, which is not growing at the same pace, has to keep scalability in mind when setting up operations. "We have to find other ways to scale. We try to scale by building [in] automation and self-service, as opposed to just throwing more people at the problem," McWilliams said. Typically, use of commercial software can not scale at such a dramatic rates, at least not in an economically feasible way.
Like most organizations, machine management has been a challenge for Google. Google engineers get their choice of operating systems on their work machines, either Apple's OS X, Google's own Chrome, one of several distributions of Linux, or Microsoft Windows. The Apple machines in particular have been hard to manage, given the limited tools available from Apple and third parties for enterprises. By McWilliams estimate, Google has one of the largest corporate IT deployments of Macs in the world, with over 30,000 units now in use. "That creates a lot of challenges for us," McWilliams said.
