The idea that Google spends big on expensive systems is a huge lie.

Google started using a Beowulf cluster that the founders wired themselves. From the very beginning, the goal of metrics collection was to optimize costs. While today it’s seen as the cash cow, the focus has always been on cheap components strung together, relying on algorithms and code for stability and making the least possible demands of underlying hardware.

To think that they won’t try to save money any time they can seems implausible.