Two billion lines of codes are needed to run Google's online services

In case you were wondering how much coding it takes to run online services of a company like Google, here is the answer. It takes around two billion lines of coding. Yes you read that right. The codebase or the instructions that run every every service of the technology giant may indeed be the largest that exists on the planet.

One of the company's engineering managers Rachel Potvin, at Silicon Valley's Scale engineering conference held last week in San Jose, revealed the figure and stated that the mammoth repository of the codebase requires up to 86TB storage space and is updated at 10 Google data centres located across the globe.

How Google's coding works

Google runs on a single unified codebase, which is stored under one unified repository. To run the program, the company has crafted its own version control system (repository of files for the source code of these programs) called Piper that allows its 25,000 engineer to contribute to it on the go. Meaning, almost 95% of the company's engineers have access to the codebase, who according to Potvin, can make as many as 45,000 adjustments in a single day.

One would think that Facebook, with the humongous user-base and its recently achieved record of over one billion people using the social media platform in a single day, would have one of the longest codebases. However, some Facebook engineers have reportedly said that the codebase of the Mark Zuckerberg-led firm clocks somewhere close to 9.9 million lines for the main site. So technically, Google's codebase can be used to create almost 20 Facebook sites.

While that may be oversimplified, if one compares Google's number with that of Microsoft's Windows operating system — touted to be one of the most complex software tools ever built — it inches close to the 50 million lines mark, much more than Facebook but significantly lower than Google's two billion.

Google's resonance over the years has amplified way beyond just being a search engine. With services ranging from Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Drive – Google is ever expanding its features and one of the major highlights is its ability to interlink or sync with each other smoothly.