Oh, you can certainly do big projects. My project[1] spanned 3 departments, and involved dozens of engineers, and required that we work with multiple hard drive vendors (our first two partners for Hybrid SMR were Seagate and WDC) on an entirely new type of HDD, as well as the T10/T13 standards committees so we could standardize the commands that we need to send to these HDD's. So this was all a huge amount of "new shit" that was not only new to Google, it was new to the HDD industry. You just have to have a really strong business case that shows how you can save Google a large amount of money.
[1] https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/dynamic-hybrid-smr...
[2] https://www.t10.org/pipermail/t10/2018-September/018566.html
On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.
[3] https://research.google/pubs/pub50833/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ABe4dsbIY
[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483542
We have some really top-notch engineers in our production kernel team, and I'm very proud to be part of an organization has this kind of talent.
[1] https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/dynamic-hybrid-smr...
[2] https://www.t10.org/pipermail/t10/2018-September/018566.html
On the production kernel team, colleagues of mine worked on some really cool and new shit: ghOSt, which delegates scheduling decisions to userspace in a highly efficient manner[3]. It was published in SOSP 2021/SIGOPS [4][5], so peer reviewers thought it was a pretty big deal. I wasn't involved in it, but I'm in awe this cool new work that my peers in the prodkernel team created, all of which was not only described in detail in peer-reviewed papers, but also published as Open Source.
[3] https://research.google/pubs/pub50833/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4ABe4dsbIY
[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483542
We have some really top-notch engineers in our production kernel team, and I'm very proud to be part of an organization has this kind of talent.