Espresso – Google’s peering edge architecture
These presentations from Google are pretty irritating at these conferences. If you're familiar with the SDN field (as most ONS attendees would be), this presentation is essentially nothing but bragging about the scale at which they operate.<p>There is no useful information in here to advance the state of the art, no new ideas, no publicly available implementations (closed or open source). It's just a very high-level architectural view of a large network given by people who are incentivized to present it in the most favorable light. And due to the lack of any concrete details, it's free from critical analysis.<p>>Espresso delivers two key pieces of innovation. First, it allows us to dynamically choose from where to serve individual users based on measurements of how end-to-end network connections are performing in real time. Second, we separate the logic and control of traffic management from the confines of individual router “boxes.”<p>The first has been done before at many levels of the network:<p>* BGP anycast<p>* DNS responses based on querier<p>* Done in load balancer<p>* IGP protocols to handle traffic internally while taking into account link congestion<p>I assume their framework gives them much nicer primitives to work with than the above, which would be an advancement in the field if we could actually see an API or something.<p>The second is very far from "innovation". This is the essence of SDN and this has been the hottest thing since sliced bread in the networking world since 2008 at a minimum [1] and even earlier if you look at things like the Aruba wireless controller.<p>1. <a href="http://archive.openflow.org/documents/openflow-wp-latest.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://archive.openflow.org/documents/openflow-wp-latest.pdf</a>