[vxNsr]

In the timestamped video link shared downthread, the speaker does seem to strongly imply that gWorkspace doesn’t manage the infra, when he finishes explaining the migration he declares (around 55:18)“[…]we can focus on the business of gmail and spanner can choose to improve and deliver performance gains automagically[sic]” which would imply, to me at least, that it’s on GCP.

[jeffbee]

That's not what it implied to me. To me, it meant that they adopted an internal managed Spanner with its own SRE team, instead of running their own Spanner. In the past, Gmail ran their own [[redacted]]s and [[redacted]] even though there were company-wide managed services for those things.

[eep_social]

Agree, but with the caveat that [[redacted]] and [[redacted]] were old and originally designed to be run that way. All newer storage systems I can recall were designed to be run by a central team after many years of experience doing it the other way. And many tears shed over migrating to those centralized versions.

Source: I was on the last team running our own [[redacted]].