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How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

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Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#61
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 a pretty terribly written article and that info graphic is also not very helpful. This article is like two people discussing "inside baseball."

The essence of the article is the evolution of Google's SDN(software defined networking) architecture. They have added SDN to their edge whereas previously SDN existed mostly in their Core it sounds like. The Edge SDN architecture being "Espresso" and the Core SDN architecture being "Jupiter."

There is also some fishing about what exactly is Google's network hardware that runs all this.

The following article is far more brief but far more informative in my opinion:

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-brings-sdn-p...

This is a white paper about Jupiter mentioned in the article and infographic:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

And there's some good resources here for just learning about SDN here:

https://www.opennetworking.org/sdn-resources/sdn-definition

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#62
post #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 ser…

I have little to nothing expirience in BGP and routing. It seems they cloudified the routing layer by making their machines part of some 'abstract router cloud' that can be reconfigured at will(centrally).

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#63
post #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 o…

> "hypercaler"

Probably a typo for https://www.hyperscalers.com/

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of Netflix bytes are largely served from Netflix's own CDN + a cadre of third party CDNs. The bytes to/from AWS isn't trivial by itself but relatively negligible compared to video traffic.

There was a guy on Australian radio today saying that international traffic from Australia and NZ has decreased by about 70% over the past few years thanks to the ever-increasing usage of CDN's putting data, in most cases, within the ISPs network. Was something interesting I hadn't thought of. He also mentioned that in NZ miserly data caps are really not implemented any more, since people just aren't using expensive…

Bandwidth is obviously not the only cost of ISP. The volume of BW even though internal CDN has to get the data from somewhere. For example in the case of GGC (Google Global Cache), for each 1 Gbps of output 100mbps on average is pulled from the internet. So for someone who is serving 10gbps ggc traffic (not that high really) - they are pulling 500mbps from the internet. Of course, a large stack of GGC servers needs power / DC rack space - which has monthly costs. As per NDA with Google - you can't actually sell Google CDN bandwidth separately from your internet BW (though many do). Also because of this large volume of traffic depending on your setup, you may have to upgrade your internal network capacity including all the way to the last mile for a decent user experience. You also need to upgrade your fibre network - if you were previously renting data (100mbps) from your distribution core providers - for small medium and often large ISPs, now you have to either increase the capacity (can be very expensive depending on which part of the world you are) or you rent a whole fibre core capacity.

People often mistakenly associate the main cost of ISPs is BW. But it's the network equipment, the constant upgrading/replacement, an army of support (both physical and phone), and the last mile connectivity is the major costs. BW itself is a small part of the cost.

Getting both Akamai and Netflix cdn has similar issues, but are harder to qualify/get than GGC cache hardware.

Yes, all these CDN providers are providing us hardware and mostly excellent support in helping to set them up - in most cases, it's setup and forgets. But for them, it's a one time cost, but for ISPs it monthly recurring cost that we can't dump on users without losing customers, we can't charge the CDN providers, we just have to silently bear the cost and hope that in 15 years if we have enough customers, we might be profitable someday.

Everyone loves to hate ISPs, and I am sure a lot of it has some justification. But sometimes the cost and pain are real. That's why there is so little competition in this sector because it involves a huge amount of upfront and recurring investment and really long waiting time before you can hope to finally make some money. Then you have brain-dead regulations from the government (not all countries of course) and aggressive competition from well-connected existing companies with deep-pocket.

There is a reason why Google fiber doesn't roll out all over the country, because even with all their money cache and network expertise and well connection throughout the government - what a daunting task it will be for them to ever be profitable. Your Ad sales can only subsidize your last mile cost for so long.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#65
post #32
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a filter bubble issue. When I first started Ruby, it had been popular for 10+ years already. Many articles. Despite that, it was still impossible to search for. Look for Ruby, get gemstones. Look for gem, get even more gemstones. Eventually Google figured it out and now it's almost impossible to search for gemstones. If I search for gem almost all search results are about Ruby things. Same when searching for Rub…

Have you tried searching when logged out of google? I'd imagine a rail worker searching lots of train stuff would generally get the right results when they searched on their account. But yea, worth bearing in mind when naming stuff.

[deleted]

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

My mothers neighbour is working part time and averaging $9000 a month. I'm a single mum and just got my first paycheck for $6546! I still can't believe it. I tried it out cause I got really desperate and now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://cutt.us/7N2sG

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure there's a subsystem for win32.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#68
post #15
post #8

I don't know, feels like a massive waste of resources and if Google is doing it simply because it can. It's probably much cheaper for everyone else to handle latency/throughput problems on the client side and application level, sticking to all the traditional networking, but not relying on it for quality. Even in the web browser we already can send all kinds of asynchronous requests to multiple servers in multiple da…

From the description, it sounds like the routers have been reduced to more simple muxers, where a small tag added to the packet determines which port it goes over instead of trying to make a complicated decision all in one focal point. This has pushed the decision back from the routers to the servers, where it scales with the number of hosts handling connections and can additionally be determined per /session/ instea…

Label switching is a pretty old concept. We had it at Inmos around 1990 and it wasn't new then.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#69

Can someone ELI5 the difference between this and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/ ? Is the technology principle the same?

Azure ExpressRoute = AWS Direct Connect = Google Cloud Interconnect All 3 are ways to connect your private datacenter or on-premise location (maybe your corporate office) directly to the cloud provider's network over a fast private link, like an industrial-sized VPN. This way you can access your cloud servers/services over this private connection rather than the public internet. Lots of companies do this if they have…

Thanks for explaining.

Do you know if such a VPN is fundamentally different from something like OpenVPN, which can also be used site-to-site?

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#70
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of Netflix bytes are largely served from Netflix's own CDN + a cadre of third party CDNs. The bytes to/from AWS isn't trivial by itself but relatively negligible compared to video traffic.

Right, I expect that the Netflix traffic numbers are for the last-mile only (CDN to customer). Google's numbers should be from a 1e100.net server to the customer across multiple networks (unless Youtube has some localized CDNs, which would complicate the math).

Both Netflix and YouTube have appliances that they provide to ISPs to put inside their networks, serving as extremely local CDNs.
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