I'm pretty surprised that Twitter is moving their homegrown stack to GCP. Twitter has a storied big data platform (Storm, Summingbird, Lambda Platform, Manhattan), and they have completely moved to the cloud. I wonder how the finances worked out; I'm sure Twitter paid a lot for their bespoke platform and Google must've been competitive. It was probably also easier as I imagine a lot of the engineers who considered those projects their children may have already moved on.
For some reason I'm kind of sad seeing Twitter's (very cool) homegrown technologies in the "Old" diagram with the "New" architecture basically Google Cloud. I'm sure it makes sense internally, but it feels like the loss of an innovation center in the streaming space.
The rationale is likely reminiscent of that motivating the outsourcing craze from 15 years ago.
When all you care about is the next quarterly report, it's real easy to sell the idea of getting rid of all that expensive technical competence from the company payroll, letting someone else know that stuff instead, then hire some a team of cheap oompa loompas straight outta college to spend all day writing -X-M-L- YAML instead.
