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How Google migrated billions of lines of code from Perforce to Piper
In 2011, Dan Bloch, the tech lead on the Perforce admin team at Google, published “Still All On One Server: Perforce at Scalehttps://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/39983.pdf .” The paper described how Google’s source control system, servicing “over twelve thousand users” a day, still ran off of a single Perforce server, tucked away under a stairwell in Building 43 on its main campus.
This came in stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom of the Git community a the time: that folks should have “more and smaller repositories”, in part due to the sheer cost of cloning a massive monolith. Jeff Dean, now Alphabet's chief scientist, personally stopped by the room that day to check in on the progress, helping boost morale, and further emphasizing the critical nature of the project. But, in time, the migration also unblocked a number of new systems through the new volumes of traffic the source control server now supported (notably including Tricorder, Google’s static analysis tool).
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