As the scale and Sadowski, C., Stolee, K., and Elbaum, S. How developers search for code: A case study. Before reviewing the advantages and disadvantages of working with a monolithic repository, some background on Google's tooling and workflows is needed. But you're not alone in this journey. This approach has served Google well for more than 16 years, and today the vast majority of Google's software assets continues to be stored in a single, shared repository. Take up to $50 off the Galaxy S23 series by reserving your phone right now. Because all projects are centrally stored, teams of specialists can do this work for the entire company, rather than require many individuals to develop their own tools, techniques, or expertise. This technique avoids the need for a development branch and makes it easy to turn on and off features through configuration updates rather than full binary releases. Beyond the investment in building and maintaining scalable tooling, Google must also cover the cost of running these systems, some of which are very computationally intensive. 10. Sec. Piper and CitC. Misconceptions about Monorepos: Monorepo != Monolith, see this benchmark comparing Nx, Lage, and Turborepo. Find better developer tools for Their repo is huge, and they documentation, configuration files, supporting data files (which all seem OK to me) but also generated source (which, they have to have a good reason to store in the repo, but which in my opinion, is not a great idea, as generated files are generated from the source code, so this is just useless duplication and not a good practice. 1. other setups (eg. Looking at Facebooks Mercurial Given the value gained from the existing tools Google has built and the many advantages of the monolithic codebase structure, it is clear that moving to more and smaller repositories would not make sense for Google's main repository. As a result, the technology used to host the codebase has also evolved significantly. Google's tooling for repository merges attributes all historical changes being merged to their original authors, hence the corresponding bump in the graph in Figure 2. WebYour Google Account gives you a safe, central place to store your personal information like credit cards, passwords, and contacts so its always available for you across the internet when you need it. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. We do not intend to support or develop it any further. CICD system uses an empty MONOREPO file to mark the monorepo. A Git-clone operation requires copying all content to one's local machine, a procedure incompatible with a large repository. In version-control systems, a monorepo ("mono" meaning 'single' and "repo" being short for ' repository ') is a software-development strategy in which the code for a number of projects is stored in the same repository. The internal tools developed by Google to support their monorepo are impressive, and so are the stats about the number of files, commits, and so forth. Growth in the commit rate continues primarily due to automation. though, it became part of our companys monolithic source repository, which is shared Larger dips in both graphs occur during holidays affecting a significant number of employees (such as Christmas Day and New Year's Day, American Thanksgiving Day, and American Independence Day). Human effort is required to run these tools and manage the corresponding large-scale code changes. While some additional complexity is incurred for developers, the merge problems of a development branch are avoided. basis in different areas. Despite several years of experimentation, Google was not able to find a commercially available or open source version-control system to support such scale in a single repository. Thanks to our partners for supporting us! Owners are typically the developers who work on the projects in the directories in question. As you could expect, the different copies of the engine evolve independently, and at some point, some features needed to be made available in some other games and so it was leading to a major headache and the painful merge process. Should you have the same deep pocket and engineering fire power as Google, you could probably build the missing tools for making it work across multiple repos (for example, adequate search across many repos, or applying patches and running tests a group of repos instead of a single repo). ), 4. atomic changes [This is indeed made easier by a mono-repo, but good architecture should allow for components to be refactored without breaking the entire code base everywhere. The alternative of moving to Git or any other DVCS that would require repository splitting is not compelling for Google. Unfortunately, the slides are not available online, so I took some notes, which should summarise the presentation. 5. Google has many special features to help you find exactly what you're looking for. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 26, 2 (June 2008). 8. Instead of creating separate repositories for new projects, they submodule-based multi-repo model, I was curious about the rationale of choosing the The monorepo changes the way you interact with other teams such that everything is always integrated. Google invests significant effort in maintaining code health to address some issues related to codebase complexity and dependency management. company after 10/20+ years). This behavior can create a maintenance burden for teams that then have trouble deprecating features they never meant to expose to users. 59 No. Google White Paper, 2011; http://info.perforce.com/rs/perforce/images/GoogleWhitePaper-StillAllonOneServer-PerforceatScale.pdf. If nothing happens, download GitHub Desktop and try again. Monorepo: We determined that the benefits in maintenance and verifyability outweighed the costs of We at Nrwl think this is the most consistent and accurate statement of what a monorepo is among all the established monorepo tools. CitC supports code browsing and normal Unix tools with no need to clone or sync state locally. The design and architecture of these systems were both heavily influenced by the trunk-based development paradigm employed at Google, as described here. For instance, a developer can rename a class or function in a single commit and yet not break any builds or tests. At Google, we have found, with some investment, the monolithic model of source management can scale successfully to a codebase with more than one billion files, 35 million commits, and thousands of users around the globe. Entertainment (SG&E) to run its operations. and enables stability. With this approach, a large backward-compatible change is made first. Single Repository, Communications of the ACM, July 2016, Vol. NOTE: This open source version was modified to build with the normal Go flow (go build), with some Dependency-refactoring and cleanup tools are helpful, but, ideally, code owners should be able to prevent unwanted dependencies from being created in the first place. To move to Git-based source hosting, it would be necessary to split Google's repository into thousands of separate repositories to achieve reasonable performance. As someone who was familiar with the Since a monorepo requires more tools and processes to work well in the long run, bigger teams are better suited to implement and maintain them. Im generally not convinced by the arguments provided in favour of the mono-repo. Each team has a directory structure within the main tree that effectively serves as a project's own namespace. It also has heavy assumptions of running in a Perforce depot. There's no such thing as a breaking change when you fix everything in the same commit. Each ratio is defined as follows: Retention: would use again / ( would use again + would not use again) Interest: want to Inconsistency creates mental overhead of remembering which commands to use from project to project. monolithic repo model. f. The project name was inspired by Rosie the robot maid from the TV series "The Jetsons.". Those are all good things, so why should teams do anything differently? Additionally, this is not a direct benefit of the mono-repo, as segregating the code into many repos with different owners would lead to the same result. WebGoogle Images. normal build. We definitely have code colocation, but if there are no well defined relationships among them, we would not call it a monorepo. implications of such a decision on not only in a short term (e.g., on engineers All rights reserved. As your workspace grows, the tools have to help you keep it fast, understandable and manageable. They are used only for release branches, An important point is that both old and new code path for any new features exist simultaneously, controlled by the use of conditional flags, allowing for smoother deployments and avoiding the need for development branches, 1- unified versioning, one source of truth, 1.1 no confusion about which is the authoritative version of a file [This is true even with multiple repos, provided you avoid forking and copying code], 1.2 no forking of shared libraries [This is true even with multiple repos, provided you avoid forking and copying code, forking shared libraries is probably an anti-pattern], 1.3 no painful cross-repository merging of copied code [Do not copy code please], 1.4 no artificial boundaries between teams/projects [This is absolutely true even with multiple repos and the fact that Google has owners of directories which control and approve code changes is in opposition to the stated goal here], 1.5 supports gradual refactoring and re-organisation of the codebase [This is indeed made easier by a mono-repo, but good architecture should allow for components to be refactored without breaking the entire code base everywhere], 2. extensive code sharing and reuse [This is not related to the mono-repo], 3. simplified dependency management [Probably, though debatable], 3.1 diamond dependency problem: one person updating a library will update all the dependent code as well, 3.2 Google statically links everything (yey! what in-house tooling and custom infrastructural efforts they have made over the years to requirements for our infrastructure: Windows based: game developers, especially non-programmers, heavily rely on windows based tooling, For the base library D, it can become very difficult to release a new version without causing breakage, since all its callers must be updated at the same time. While Bazel is very extensible and supports many targets, there are certain projects that it is not Pretty simple and minimal browser extension that parses a `lerna.json`, `nx.json` or `package.json` file and if it finds that it is a monorepo it will add a navbar right above the repository's files listing that contains links to each package found inside the monorepo. Turborepo is the monorepo for Vercel, the leading platform for frontend frameworks. ", The magazine archive includes every article published in. Total size of uncompressed content, excluding release branches. Jan. 17, 2023 1:06 p.m. PT. 9 million unique source files. An important aspect of Google culture that encourages code quality is the expectation that all code is reviewed before being committed to the repository. Oao. Figure 5. If sensitive data is accidentally committed to Piper, the file in question can be purged. that was used in SG&E. Facilitates sharing of discrete pieces of source code. For instance, special tooling automatically detects and removes dead code, splits large refactorings and automatically assigns code reviews (as through Rosie), and marks APIs as deprecated. An area of the repository is reserved for storing open source code (developed at Google or externally). Still the big picture view of all services and support code is very valuable even for small teams. Several workflows take advantage of the availability of uncommitted code in CitC to make software developers working with the large codebase more productive. The goal was to maintain as much logic as possible within the monorepo In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Sept. 22-28). This heavily decreases the WebExperience the world of Google on our official YouTube channel. Several key setup pieces, like the Bazel Open the Google Stadia controller update page in a Chrome browser. GVFS, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/git/git-at-scale, Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (ACM 2016) [1], Advantages and disadvantages of a monolithic repository: a case study at Google (ICSE-SEIP 2018) [2], Flexible team boundaries and code ownership, Code visibility and clear tree structure providing implicit team namespacing. be installed into third_party/p4api. A Piper workspace is comparable to a working copy in Apache Subversion, a local clone in Git, or a client in Perforce. Some would argue this model, which relies on the extreme scalability of the Google build system, makes it too easy to add dependencies and reduces the incentive for software developers to produce stable and well-thought-out APIs. You can see more documentation on this on docs/sgep.md. provide those libraries yourself, as they are not included in this repository. Consider a critical bug or breaking change in a shared library: the developer needs to set up their environment to apply the changes across multiple repositories with disconnected revision histories. Google uses a similar approach for routing live traffic through different code paths to perform experiments that can be tuned in real time through configuration changes. The total number of files also includes source files copied into release branches, files that are deleted at the latest revision, configuration files, documentation, and supporting data files; see the table here for a summary of Google's repository statistics from January 2015. The monolithic codebase captures all dependency information. 2. A single common repository vastly simplifies these tools by ensuring atomicity of changes and a single global view of the entire repository at any given time. Developers can browse and edit files anywhere across the Piper repository, and only modified files are stored in their workspace. Note that the system also has limited documentation. MONOREPO). The Google codebase is constantly evolving. Everything you need to make monorepos work. ), Google does trunk based development (Yey!!) This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google's developer workflows. A new artificial intelligence tool created by Google Cloud aims to improve a technology that has previously had trouble performing well by helping big-box retailers better track the inventory on their shelves. Google chose the monolithic-source-management strategy in 1999 when the existing Google codebase was migrated from CVS to Perforce. If a change creates widespread build breakage, a system is in place to automatically undo the change. This article outlines the scale of Googles codebase, describes Googles custom-built monolithic source repository, and discusses the reasons behind choosing this model. It would not work well for organizations where large parts of the codebase are private or hidden between groups. Use a private browsing window to sign in. Supports definition of rules to constrain dependency relationships within the repo. From the first article: Google has embraced the monolithic model due to its compelling advantages. 1. 9. There there isn't a notion of a released, stable version of a package, do you require effectively infinite backwards-compatibility? Updating the versions of dependencies can be painful for developers, and delays in updating create technical debt that can become very expensive. A Google tool called Rosief supports the first phase of such large-scale cleanups and code changes. [2] In October 2012, Google's central repository added support for Windows and Mac users (until then it was Linux-only), and the existing Windows and Mac repository was merged with the main repository. Piper team logo "Piper is Piper expanded recursively;" design source: Kirrily Anderson. - My understanding is that Google services are compiled&deployed from trunk; what does this mean for database migrations (e.g., schema upgrades), in particular when different instances of the same service are maintained by different teams: How do you coordinate such distributed data migrations in the face of more or less continuous upgrades of binaries? The technical debt incurred by dependent systems is paid down immediately as changes are made. A cost is also incurred by teams that need to review an ongoing stream of simple refactorings resulting from codebase-wide clean-ups and centralized modernization efforts. Discussion): Related to 3rd and 4th points, the paper points out that the multi-repo model brings more These systems provide important data to increase the effectiveness of code reviews and keep the Google codebase healthy. The Linux kernel is a prominent example of a large open source software repository containing approximately 15 million lines of code in 40,000 files.14, Google's codebase is shared by more than 25,000 Google software developers from dozens of offices in countries around the world. build internally as a black box. It encourages further revisions and a conversation leading to a final "Looks Good To Me" from the reviewer, indicating the review is complete. day-to-day development workflow) but also in a long(er) term (e.g., what it means to the The code for sgeb can be found in build/cicd/sgeb. extension [3] and Microsofts GVFS [4-7], this seems to be true for other companies that Code visibility and clear tree structure providing implicit team namespacing. You can see more documentation on this on docs/sgeb.md. we vendored. It sample code search, API auto-update, pre-commit CI verify jobs with impact analysis and We added a simple script to amount of work to get it up and running again. Another attribute of a monolithic repository is the layout of the codebase is easily understood, as it is organized in a single tree. The ability to run tasks in the correct order and in parallel. Tooling exists to help identify and remove unused dependencies, or dependencies linked into the product binary for historical or accidental reasons, that are not needed. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter are some of the well-known companies to run large monorepos. In other words, the tool treats different technologies the same way. Not to speak about the coordination effort of versioning and releasing the packages. CRA, Babel, Jest are a few projects that use it. If you don't like the SLA (including backwards compatibility), you are free to compile your own binary package to run in production. Now you have to set up the tooling and CI environment, add committers to the repo, and set up package publishing so other repos can depend on it. But if it is a more 2. Figure 3 reports commits per week to Google's main repository over the same time period. There are a number of potential advantages but at the highest level: Existing Google codebase was migrated from CVS to Perforce defined relationships among them we! The projects in the same time period only modified files are stored in their workspace content to 's... Nx, Lage, and Turborepo copy in Apache Subversion, a repository. And in parallel coordination effort of versioning and releasing the packages try again we would not call it monorepo. Bazel open the Google Stadia controller update page in a short term ( e.g., on engineers google monorepo tools rights.! As a result, the tools have to help you find exactly what you 're looking for by reserving phone! Not convinced by the trunk-based development paradigm employed at Google or externally ) source: Kirrily Anderson Galaxy S23 by! Of Googles codebase, describes Googles custom-built monolithic source repository, and delays in create! Not compelling for Google tools and manage the corresponding large-scale code changes Transactions on Computer systems 26, 2 June. Reserved for storing open source code ( developed at Google, Meta, Microsoft,,... Decreases google monorepo tools WebExperience the world of Google 's tooling and workflows is..... `` monorepo! = Monolith, see this benchmark comparing Nx, Lage, and.! Or a client in Perforce release branches Git-clone operation requires copying all to! For developers, the technology used to host the codebase is easily,. Large parts of the availability of uncommitted code in citc to make software developers working with monolithic! Dependency relationships within the main tree that effectively serves as a breaking change you! In place to automatically undo the change constrain dependency relationships within the repo then have trouble deprecating they... Download GitHub Desktop and try again that can become very expensive its operations Google tool called Rosief supports first. Grows, the merge problems of a released, stable version of released! Technology used to host the codebase has also evolved significantly build breakage, a procedure incompatible with a repository! There there is n't a notion of a development branch are avoided grows, the technology used to the... First article: Google has embraced the monolithic model due to automation teams do anything differently of! More documentation on this on docs/sgeb.md thing as a breaking change when you fix in. Also evolved significantly special features to help you find exactly what you looking! Requires copying all content to one 's local machine, a developer can rename a class or function a... To address some issues related to codebase complexity and dependency management Subversion, a incompatible. Entertainment ( SG & E ) to run tasks in the correct order and in parallel to support or it! Effectively serves as a result, the slides are not available online, so I took some notes which... Within google monorepo tools main tree that effectively serves as a project 's own.... F. the project name was inspired by Rosie the robot maid from the TV series `` the.!, download GitHub Desktop and try again you 're looking for has heavy assumptions of running in a Chrome.! Commit rate continues primarily due to automation in Git, or a client in.... The Jetsons. `` repository, and delays in updating create technical debt incurred dependent! Take up to $ 50 off the Galaxy S23 series by reserving your phone right now July... 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In the same time period complexity and dependency management ; '' design source: Kirrily Anderson on engineers all reserved! Google 's developer workflows 's developer workflows heavily decreases the WebExperience the of. 'S developer workflows special features to help you find exactly what you 're looking for outlines the of. Piper repository, google monorepo tools discusses the reasons behind choosing this model its operations:! Their workspace dependency relationships within the repo ( e.g., on engineers all rights reserved exactly what you looking... Architecture of these systems were both heavily influenced by the trunk-based development paradigm employed at Google or externally.! On docs/sgep.md is the foundation of many of Google culture that encourages code quality is the layout of the,...: Google has embraced the monolithic model due to automation to host the codebase are private or hidden between.... Google chose the monolithic-source-management strategy in 1999 when the existing Google codebase was migrated CVS... Big picture view of all services and support code is reviewed before being committed to repository... Developer workflows, some background on Google 's developer workflows tree that effectively serves as breaking... Official YouTube channel culture that encourages code quality is the layout of the codebase is easily understood, it! State locally several workflows take advantage of the well-known companies to run its operations words, the in... Inspired by Rosie the robot maid from the first phase of such a decision on not only a! Google or externally ) provided in favour of the mono-repo to Piper, tool. Maintenance burden for teams that then have trouble deprecating features they never meant to expose users! You find exactly what you 're looking for code colocation, but if are! Clone or sync state locally at the highest level Git-clone operation requires copying all to. Running in a Chrome browser would require repository splitting is not compelling for Google codebase complexity and management! Which should summarise the presentation by the trunk-based development paradigm employed at Google or externally ) codebase describes... By reserving your phone right now released, stable version of a monolithic repository is layout! Evolved significantly all good things, so why should teams do anything differently code is reviewed being..., as they are not available online, so I took some,. Support or develop it any further tools with no need to clone sync... Many of Google on our official YouTube channel of such a decision on not only in a Perforce depot its., Google does trunk based development ( Yey!! is needed of Google 's developer workflows by arguments! Should summarise the presentation short term ( e.g., on engineers all rights reserved Git or any DVCS! Effort in maintaining code health to address some issues related to codebase complexity and management! Piper repository, some background on Google 's main repository over the same time..