Espresso - Google's peering edge architecture

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Google Fellow Amin Vahdat,

“Early on, we realized that the network we needed to support our services did not exist and could not be bought,”

Espresso makes Google cloud faster, more available and cost effective by extending SDN to the public internet

  • network should be treated as a large-scale distributed system
  • leveraging the same control infrastructure we developed for Google’s compute and storage systems

nespresso-1

Four pillars on Google’s SDN strategy

  • Jupiter: Google employed SDN principles to build Jupiter, a data center interconnect capable of supporting more than 100,000 servers. As of 2013 it supports more than 1 Pb/s of total bandwidth to host its services.
  • B4 WAN interconnect: Google constructed B4 to connect its data centers to one another to replicate data in real-time between individual campuses. “It’s built on white boxes with our software controlling it,” said Vahdat at today’s session. “Our goal was to build a copy network. As it’s grown it’s become mission critical. B4 grows faster than our public network.”
  • Andromeda: Google’s Andromeda is a network functions virtualization (NFV) stack that allows it to deliver the same capabilities available to its native applications all the way to containers and virtual machines running on the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Espresso : Google’s peering edge architecture. Select the optimal internal server and route based on the real-time information

Background

For example, consider real-time voice search. Answering the question “What’s the latest news?” with Google Assistant requires a fast, low-latency connection from a user’s device to the edge of Google’s network, and from the edge of our network to one of our data centers. Once inside a data center, hundreds—or even thousands—of individual servers must consult vast amounts of data to score the mapping of an audio recording to possible phrases in one of many languages and dialects. The resulting phrase is then passed to another cluster to perform a web search, consulting a real-time index of internet content. The results are then gathered, scored and returned to the edge of Google’s network back to the end user.

Innovation

  1. dynamically choose from where to serve individual users based on measurements of how end-to-end network connections are performing in real time.
  2. separate the logic and control of traffic management from the confines of individual router “boxes. Rather than relying on thousands of individual routers to manage and learn from packet streams, we push the functionality to a distributed system that extracts the aggregate information.

Reference

https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-brings-sdn-public-internet/2017/04/

https://blog.google/topics/google-cloud/making-google-cloud-faster-more-available-and-cost-effective-extending-sdn-public-internet-espresso/