CONTRIBUTED ARTICLES Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository By Rachel Potvin, Josh Levenberg Communications of the ACM, July 2016, Vol. 59 No. 7, Pages 78-87 10.1145/2854146 Comments (3) VIEW AS: Print Mobile App ACM Digital Library Full Text (PDF) In the Digital Edition SHARE: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Hacker News Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook Credit: Iwona Usakiewicz / Andrij Borys Associates Early Google employees decided to work with a shared codebase managed through a centralized source control system. This approach has served Google well for more than 16 years, and today the vast majority of Google's software assets continues to be stored in a single, shared repository. Meanwhile, the number of Google software developers has steadily increased, and the size of the Google codebase has grown exponentially (see Figure 1 ). As a result, the technology used to host the codebase has also evolved sign...