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How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

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Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#51
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content creators are mastering chopping up content into separate videos with enough continuity and hooks to keep people clicking next video, next video, next video... It's quite scary actually what the current and future generations are being conditioned to do.

Have you heard of soap operas?

I agree the parent poster was being dramatic. Soap operas, however, make you wait until the following day to see what happened.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#52
post #38
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, that for me culminated when windows released a ubuntu subsystem. The names in order of popularity when it was originally announced (now they push for WSL) 1. Bash for Ubuntu on Windows 2. Windows Bash Shell 3. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Trying googling WSL - it's world surf league. Windows Bash Shell is impossible, so is Bash for Ubuntu on Windows. It's getting better as more and more articles are being w…

And the 3rd name is backwards. It ought to be called 'Linux Subsystem for Windows'.

As mentioned by others, the emphasis in the name is on the fact that it's a Windows Subsystem. The historical precedent for this name is "Windows Services for UNIX", which similarly provided a Unix environment on Windows NT.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#53
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content may be Netflix, but it's delivered over CDNs, and much of that infrastructure isn't operated by Netflix. That's what the "originate" in the original statement is likely implying. Content ownership and access vs content delivery at a network level.

We (netflix) operate our own CDN. See https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

Yes, but my understanding is that quite a bit of it is still served through partner CDN services, is it not? I was aware that Netflix served at least some of the content themselves (and growing, I assume), so was attempting to imply that the 37% noted for content access for Netflix may not equate exactly to 37% network delivery for Netflix, as they measure different things. I didn't mean to imply none of that should be attributed to Netflix's own network.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#54
post #26

I really wanted to understand this article. I tried wikipediaing and googling some of the things I didn't really get (Jupiter is a thing... ok and Andromeda.. riiiight). Then I got to the chart "Conceptually, here is how Espresso plugs into the Google networking stack:", which was totally unparseable by me. All the green things look the same, but one of them is the thing this article is about (Espresso, right?), and…

I really hate the naming trend over the past 10-15 years of using common words for projects. I can't really search for Espresso, or Jupiter, or Andromeda without additional qualifiers that I may not know yet.

Also when did EmcaScript conveniently became ES?

when i see someone mention ES6, I think its elasticserch but its not

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THAT IS IT! I was wondering why the name always felt funky. Although the name they have now is technically correct if you ignore standard noun to adjective conventions.

...or it's missing an apostrophe. a. Windows' Subsystem for Linux b. Window's Subsystem for Linux Each option has its own sort of context.

If you're making it a possessive using an apostrophe, then it should be "Windows's Subsystem for Linux" because Windows is singular in that context.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the 3rd name is backwards. It ought to be called 'Linux Subsystem for Windows'.

I disagree. Microsoft is correct; mostly if not entirely. Q: It's a subsystem? What kind of subsystem? A: It's a Windows subsystem? Q: A subsystem for what? A: It's the Windows subsystem for Linux. As another commentator mentioned, there's probably a missing possessive ("'s"), but even if we take the proper name to be more of an adjective modifying/qualifying "subsystem", it's a Windows subsystem, it's purpose is run…

But we don't have the Windows Subsystem for Win32, the Windows Manager for I/O, etc., so while the naming is technically correct, it is inconsistent.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or it's missing an apostrophe. a. Windows' Subsystem for Linux b. Window's Subsystem for Linux Each option has its own sort of context.

If you're making it a possessive using an apostrophe, then it should be "Windows's Subsystem for Linux" because Windows is singular in that context.

That's not the entire story, unfortunately. There are other rules. For example, Windows might be considered a family name, as there are several Windows Operating Systems. Also, this is a technical name, and technical writing often follows different rules, specifically in cases such as this.

For the possessive form of Windows I would look at the Microsoft Manual of Style, which for me is the fourth edition.

Page 184: Possessive Nouns

--------------

Do not use the possessive form of Microsoft. Do not use the possessive form of other company names unless you have no other choice. And do not use the possessive form of a product, service, or feature name. You can use these names as adjectives, or you can use an of construction instead.

Microsoft style:

  the Windows interface

  Microsoft products, services, and technologies

  Word templates
--------------

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#58
post #26

I really wanted to understand this article. I tried wikipediaing and googling some of the things I didn't really get (Jupiter is a thing... ok and Andromeda.. riiiight). Then I got to the chart "Conceptually, here is how Espresso plugs into the Google networking stack:", which was totally unparseable by me. All the green things look the same, but one of them is the thing this article is about (Espresso, right?), and…

I understand as much as is to be expected after looking at someone else's (Google's) huge software stack in an area that is not my specialization (networking). My only tip is to not actually worry about grasping everything at first and just start to build up lists of facts and associations (e.g. "Espresso is a networking stack to do routing over the public Internet", "Espresso pulls the routing intelligence outside of individual routers into a server pool"). With time and after studying more of the conceptual background, everything starts to make sense typically.

There are definitely some Googlisms or something being thrown around though. Can anyone tell me what a "hypercaler" is?

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#59
post #26

I really wanted to understand this article. I tried wikipediaing and googling some of the things I didn't really get (Jupiter is a thing... ok and Andromeda.. riiiight). Then I got to the chart "Conceptually, here is how Espresso plugs into the Google networking stack:", which was totally unparseable by me. All the green things look the same, but one of them is the thing this article is about (Espresso, right?), and…

It's extremely high level and vague presumably by intention. If you don't have a grounding in networking, BGP, traffic engineering (MPLS, SR, related concepts), you won't be able to make out much about it. If you do, you'll just infer that they're doing a form of "egress peer engineering". On top of that it sounds like they're potentially using whitebox switches at the edge and terminating BGP peering sessions on servers which are programming the forwarding state on these white boxes.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#60
post #26

I really wanted to understand this article. I tried wikipediaing and googling some of the things I didn't really get (Jupiter is a thing... ok and Andromeda.. riiiight). Then I got to the chart "Conceptually, here is how Espresso plugs into the Google networking stack:", which was totally unparseable by me. All the green things look the same, but one of them is the thing this article is about (Espresso, right?), and…

Here's my attempt at an explanation, after reading the article.

Most companies' networks have edge routers (which sit at the points where they connect to other networks) and core routers (which manage the flow of traffic inside the network. All these routers basically use a standard protocol called BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) which is defined by RFC 4271.

However, BGP was still designed from the view of individual machines making routing decisions and announcing routes to each other that collectively make up the whole Internet. This helps the Internet as a whole be quite resilient – if one network goes down, there are still ways to route traffic through to other networks. Also, since the protocol is standard, you can swap out one vendor's gear for another at will (in theory anyway) as long as you know how to configure it correctly.

But this leads to some inefficiency – for instance, it is very hard to say that a path with fewer hops will lead to lower latency. What Google seems to have done is to make their edge routers into one single "intelligent" network, where the edge routers don't make routing decisions on their own, but feed their data into a central server. This central server can then say stuff like "My peering router in NYC seems to be under heavy load, let me redirect some of my traffic to NYC destinations through the NJ datacenter instead", or something to that effect; while still doing the correct BGP announcements from the point of view of Level3 or whoever is peering.

In short, they built their internal network from the ground up since they are so big they can afford to build custom routing gear instead of using the standard off-the-shelf, standardized setup that a small or medium-sized company uses. The network consisting of their custom edge routers (all the green blobs) together is called Espresso and represented by a light grey circle.

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