After all, you’re not Google, and you won’t be anytime soon. Yes, I’ve argued that “run like Google” is an achievable goal, but the kinds of challenges Google faces are generally not the problems you’re going to have in your lifetime. Google’s Zanzibar is an example of tech that is awesome for Google but likely won’t be for mainstream enterprises.

Be yourself

To be clear, this is an argument against running like Google, particularly when the inspiration comes from Google research papers. It’s emphatically not an argument against buying from Google (Cloud). As mentioned, Google Cloud has hit a rich vein with enterprise adoption. Google BigQuery and other services, plus new AI models like Gemini 2.0, have helped many enterprises level up the way they build and run software. They represent Google taking the best of its technology approaches and applying them to mainstream enterprise use cases.

But you’re not Google. Google, for example, boasts massive scale and tackles that scale with a homogeneous technology stack and an enormous monorepo. In the industry, we talk a lot about the need to move to microservices-based architectures, and Google also heavily uses microservices. But Google, as well as other tech giants, relies on monorepos, site reliability engineers, and other approaches that really don’t apply to most enterprises.