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How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

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Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#71

Post by skrebbel »

komali2 wrote: post #29
trafficlight wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The internal name is lxss. I'm sad they didnt make that the default because it's very googlable.

That said WSL tends to work if you pair it with whatever your issue is.

IMO the most ridiculous name in this whole story is their github repo, Microsoft/BashOnWindows. I mean, bash has worked fine on Windows for decades, and it doesn't require an entire subsystem at all :-) WSL isn't half bad compared to that.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#72

Post by Animats »

mandarg wrote: post #60
komali2 wrote: 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…

"Central server" for routing. Uh oh.

AT&T used to try to avoid centralization, but ended up with routing controlled from Bedminster, NJ.[1] An interesting comment from AT&T's NOC tour guide is that load doesn't vary much any more. AT&T used to have holiday calling surges and such, but now, in an always-on world, overall load is relatively steady.

[1] http://fortune.com/att-global-network-operations-center/

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#73

Post by hueving »

komali2 wrote: 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…

Google produces notoriously opaque and high-level articles with regard to its networking systems. You are not meant to get much meaning out of them. Instead you should stand back in awe at the amazing things they are doing.

Nearly every Google paper about Google networks in SIGCOMM is utter trash that would have been rejected in an instant due to lack of novel details if it had come from anyone else. They just brag about scale, utilization, and resiliency without actually giving anything back to the academic community.

Note: This does not apply to all Google papers (e.g. spanner and other DB ones are pretty good). Their networking publications seem to be crippled by either IP concerns or poor academic writers.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#74

Post by runeks »

Animats wrote: post #72
mandarg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Central server" for routing. Uh oh. AT&T used to try to avoid centralization, but ended up with routing controlled from Bedminster, NJ.[1] An interesting comment from AT&T's NOC tour guide is that load doesn't vary much any more. AT&T used to have holiday calling surges and such, but now, in an always-on world, overall load is relatively steady. [1] http://fortune.com/att-global-network-operations-center/

You can easily employ redundancy for core services. Core functionality doesn't need to be synonymous with central point of failure. For example, you have three healthy copies of the core service running at all times, combined with failover. All software systems have a core function that must work or else the system fails, but that doesn't mean all software systems are centralized in any useful sense of the word.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#75

Post by kingosticks »

mjevans wrote: post #15
zzzcpan wrote: 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…

The speedup from traditional MPLS already comes from the simple next-hop only lookup required by the router. There's no complicated decision making going on. Something central still manages the labels, that's the complexity but that's not new either.

Google still buy and use a ton of traditional mega (tera) high bandwidth networking gear. All of which will support regular label switching. But that doesn't sound cool and exciting so they always play that down. They can spin it that way if they like, network hardware vendors don't care because they are still selling them their boxes.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

trafficlight wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: 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.

I hate it too.

Especially if they take something with a somewhat awesome name. It waters the meaning down. My go-to example is Terraform, a glorified configuration manager that has absolutely nothing to do with the process of terraforming.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#77

Post by flavor8 »

Swizec wrote: post #31
komali2 wrote: 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…

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…

Try the same searches from an incognito window. It could just be that Google learned what Ruby you are searching for.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#78

Post by VonGallifrey »

linkregister wrote: post #51
tonmoy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this different to a YouTuber? They (at least the ones I have seen) release their Videos daily (or less often) as well and sometimes with different Content on different days. So you might even have to wait 2 Days or even a week to get the new episode of the Series you where watching.

It's true that you can binge on a series if you are new to the series (youtube or otherwise) but if you are up to date that is no longer the case.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#79

Post by adrianratnapala »

trafficlight wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: 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.

To me it seems a return to the an older tradition, of names being names rather than descriptions (which inevitably fail to describe).

Using common words for names is also ancient and inevitable. In the modern age there is a practical argument against it -- as made up nonsense is more googlable. But people making up names don't really care about that in any visceral way.

Re: How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet

#80

Post by mandarg »

Animats wrote: post #72
mandarg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Central server" for routing. Uh oh. AT&T used to try to avoid centralization, but ended up with routing controlled from Bedminster, NJ.[1] An interesting comment from AT&T's NOC tour guide is that load doesn't vary much any more. AT&T used to have holiday calling surges and such, but now, in an always-on world, overall load is relatively steady. [1] http://fortune.com/att-global-network-operations-center/

It's interesting to know that a traditional ISP like AT&T is heading the same way.

I think Google gets more freedom to try out some of these techniques because people still fundamentally think of them as a website (apart from Google Fiber, they don't serve end-users directly); whereas AT&T, being an ISP, is treated more like a water / power service, in that people expect them to be working by default, and going down is absolutely unacceptable.

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