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Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

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Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#81

Post by eru »

thrw42A8N wrote: post #20
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always release capital back to investors, and then those investors can put the money into different companies that eg produce networking equipment.

Why would they release money if they can invest it and return much more?

I was working under HDThoreaun's assumption that the margins would be lower.

If they have other opportunities for investment with higher margins, they should seize those, of course. And perhaps even call up investors for more capital, if required.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#82

Post by lovich »

eru wrote: post #81
thrw42A8N wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they release money if they can invest it and return much more?

I was working under HDThoreaun's assumption that the margins would be lower. If they have other opportunities for investment with higher margins, they should seize those, of course. And perhaps even call up investors for more capital, if required.

When the agents employed by investors would be harmed by releasing capital back, which is guaranteed since so many people’s compensation is in the form of stock and returning capital leads to decreasing stock value, why would those agents ever return the capital voluntarily?

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#83

Post by eru »

lovich wrote: post #82
eru wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working under HDThoreaun's assumption that the margins would be lower. If they have other opportunities for investment with higher margins, they should seize those, of course. And perhaps even call up investors for more capital, if required.

When the agents employed by investors would be harmed by releasing capital back, which is guaranteed since so many people’s compensation is in the form of stock and returning capital leads to decreasing stock value, why would those agents ever return the capital voluntarily?

Have you heard of stock buybacks?

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#84

Post by belter »

joshuamorton wrote: post #70
retinaros wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what happened in gcp paris region then?

One of the vanishingly small set of issues I mentioned. It is true, and obvious, that GCP and AWS and Azure use different architectures. It does not obviously follow that any of those architectures are inherently more reliable. And even if it did, it doesn't obviously follow that any of the platforms are inherently more reliable due to a specific architectural decision. Like, all cloud providers still have regional o…

I think you should have started this discussion by disclosing you work at Google...

> One of the vanishingly small set of issues

At your scale, this attitude is even more concerning since the rare event at scale is not rare anymore.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#85

Post by belter »

nl wrote: post #77
belter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I provided three different references. Despite the massive downvotes on my comment I guess by Google engineers, as a troll...:-)I take comfort on the fact nobody was able to advance a reference to prove me wrong.

AWS Zone is sort-roughly-kinda a GCP Region. It sounds like you want multi-region: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones

> It sounds like you want multi-region

If you use Google Cloud....with the 100 ms of latency that will add to every interaction....

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#86

Post by wil421 »

immibis wrote: post #30
adrian_b wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia networking is what used to be called Mellanox networking, which was already dominant in datacenters.

Only within supercomputers (including the smaller GPU ones used to train AI). Normal data centers use Cisco or Juniper or similarly.well known Ethernet equipment, and they still do. The Mellanox/Nvidia Infiniband networks are specifically used for supercomputer-like clusters.

Most people on the TrueNAS/FreeNAS forums use 10gb Mellanox nics that are sold on eBay. The sellers get them after server gear gets retired.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#87

Post by HDThoreaun »

lovich wrote: post #82
eru wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working under HDThoreaun's assumption that the margins would be lower. If they have other opportunities for investment with higher margins, they should seize those, of course. And perhaps even call up investors for more capital, if required.

When the agents employed by investors would be harmed by releasing capital back, which is guaranteed since so many people’s compensation is in the form of stock and returning capital leads to decreasing stock value, why would those agents ever return the capital voluntarily?

Buybacks increase stock price. Nvidia has a tiny dividend but most shareholder returns are in the form of buybacks.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#88

Post by joshuamorton »

belter wrote: post #84
joshuamorton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the vanishingly small set of issues I mentioned. It is true, and obvious, that GCP and AWS and Azure use different architectures. It does not obviously follow that any of those architectures are inherently more reliable. And even if it did, it doesn't obviously follow that any of the platforms are inherently more reliable due to a specific architectural decision. Like, all cloud providers still have regional o…

I think you should have started this discussion by disclosing you work at Google... > One of the vanishingly small set of issues At your scale, this attitude is even more concerning since the rare event at scale is not rare anymore.

I think you're abusing the saying "at scale, rare events aren't rare" (https://longform.asmartbear.com/scale-rare/ etc.) here. It is true that when you are running thousands of machines, events that happen rarely happen often, but that scale usually becomes relevant at thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of things (https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...).

That concept is useful when the scale of things you have is the same order of magnitude as the rate of failure. But we clearly don't have that here, because even at scale, these events aren't common. Like I said, there have been, across all cloud providers, less than a handful over a decade.

Like, you seem to be proclaiming that these kinds of events are common and, well, no, they aren't. That's why they make the top of HN when they do happen.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#89

Post by traceroute66 »

rescbr wrote: post #72
anewplace wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to make you divulge anything. I don't particularly care who you talk to, or who you are, nor do I care if you take it as a "personal insult" that you might be wrong. You are right that it would be nuts that multiple senior people would collude to lie to you, which is why it's almost certainly more likely that you are just misunderstanding the information that was provided to you. It's possible to prove…

You know it is very much region dependent. You are correct many facilities are owned by the hyperscalers, and they also extensively use colos for hosting entire regions (not only PoPs), specially outside the US. More recently I’d also include Ireland. I have worked at two cloud providers very close to the netops teams due to my customers, but I have signed NDAs so I won’t go further into it, specially since one of my…

I see anewplace hasn't come down on you (@rescbr) like a ton of bricks like he did for me.

You are basically saying the same thing I did, but with different words.

So anewplace owes me a big-time apology.

Re: Speed, scale and reliability: 25 years of Google datacenter networking evolution

#90

Post by traceroute66 »

anewplace wrote: post #47
traceroute66 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm not trying to make you divulge anything. I don't particularly care who you talk to, or who you are, nor do I care if you take it as a "personal insult" that you might be wrong. You are right that it would be nuts that multiple senior people would collude to lie to you, which is why it's almost certainly more likely that you are just misunderstanding the information that was provided to you. It's possible to prove…

> try to be more open to the possibility that you're wrong,

Same to you chum, same to you.

Just because it doesn't look that way from your view of the world, doesn't mean you are right either.

Perhaps just accept we are both right and that you are missing aspects of my context that I cannot talk about due to the sensitive nature of it.

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