This is not really accurate. OCSes like this have been used for a long time in telecom, and we've proposed their use in datacenters in various ways as research, but this is this the first large scale datacenter deployment that I'm aware of. It's quite nice to see it being published.

(* I was at Google when this was happening but have no relationship to it; I was publishing competing/collaborating work on OCSes with the UCSD folk a decade ago)