What is a prober? Why do we need them? It baffled me somewhat that probers were not well known, let alone used, in most of the places I worked at after leaving Google in 2021. How was it possible that something that plays a vital role in reliability at Google and possibly other big techs, is not used more widely.

I started building Cloudprober in 2016, while I was at Google, leading the Cloud Networking SRE team there. Google Cloud was just beginning to grow big, and we were still grappling with some early growth issue.