Monolithic Repositories with Ciera Jaspan

Google’s codebase is managed in a single monolithic repository. An engineer at Google can explore almost any area of the codebase within the entire company. In order to enable this, Google has built tooling to support the monolithic repo, including a virtual file system and a set of build tools.

A monolithic repository is not to be confused with a monolithic deployment. Google’s infrastructure consists of thousands of small services interacting over a network, and scaling individually. But all of the code for each of these different independent modules is in the same version control system.

Ciera Jaspan is a staff software engineer at Google working on developer infrastructure. She worked on an internal research project within Google to find out how engineers felt about the monolithic repository system and how it compared to a large number of small repositories.

Ciera joins the show to discuss repository management, internal tooling, and Google’s approach to researching developer productivity within the company.

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Transcript

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