xg2xg

xg2xg is a "handy lookup table" put together by ex-Googlers to help other ex-Googlers find equivalents in the outside world for the internal tools they used at Google. People who worked at Google for a long time often refer to systems by their internal names — Borg, Bigtable, Spanner, Chubby, Flume, Stubby — and when they leave, they no longer have access to those tools. This README maps each Google-internal name to its public Google Cloud equivalent (when there is one) and to open-source or third-party alternatives.

The way it works is just by reading. The repository is essentially one long Markdown document organized into sections like Core Technology, Infrastructure, Storage, and Services. Each section is a table with three or four columns: Google internal name, Google external (Cloud) product, and open-source or real-world alternatives, sometimes with a SaaS column. If you remember Borg, the Infrastructure row points you at Kubernetes and at alternatives like Apache Mesos, Apache Aurora, and HashiCorp Nomad. Bigtable maps to Cloud Bigtable plus open-source databases such as Cassandra and HBase, and so on across many categories.

You would use this when you have just left Google or are about to, and need to translate your mental model into tools that exist outside, or when you are reading Google papers or talks and want to know what comparable systems are available. It is also useful as a general reference for anyone curious about the open-source landscape behind Google-style infrastructure. The README explicitly asks contributors not to list confidential projects and welcomes pull requests with additions. The full README is longer than what was provided.