In Azure - which I think is at Google scale - everything is dynamically linked. Actually a lot of Azure is built on C# which does not even support static linking...

Statically linking being necessary for scaling does not pass the smell test for me.

Azure's devops record is not nearly as good as Google's was.

The biggest datasets that ChatGPT is aware of being processed in complex analytics jobs on Azure are roughly a thousand times smaller than an estimate of Google's regularly processed snapshot of the web. There is a reason why most of the fundamental advancements in how to parallelize data and computations - such as map-reduce and BigTable - all came from Google. Nobody else worked at their scale before they did. (Then Google published it, and people began to implement it. Then failed to understand what was operationally important to making it actually work at scale...)

So, despite how big it is, I don't think that Azure operates at Google scale.

For the record, back when I worked at Google, the public internet was only the third largest network that I knew of. Larger still was the network that Google uses for internal API calls. (Do you have any idea how many API calls it takes to serve a Google search page?) And larger still was the network that kept data synchronized between data centers. (So, for example, you don't lose your mail if a data center goes down.)

I never worked for Google, but have seen some strange things like bit flips at more modest scales. From the parent description, it looks like defaulting to static binaries is helping to speed up troubleshooting to remove the “this should never happen, but statistically will happen every so often” class of bugs.

As I see it, the issue isn’t requiring static compiling to scale. It’s requiring it to make troubleshooting or measuring performance at scale easier. Not required, per se, but very helpful.

perhaps that's why azure has such a bad reputation in the devops crowd.