Google shares software network load balancer design powering GCP networking
The consistent hashing stuff in the paper is pretty cool. In order to distribute traffic among backends, they came up with a new "Maglev hashing" algorithm that gives a more even distribution than existing techniques, but is less robust to changes in the set of servers. The trick is that you can locally memoize the results of your mostly-consistent hash function, and rely on an extra layer of connection affinity from the upstream ECMP routers to the load-balancers, so that the same memoized value is used every time. So you never actually drop connections unless <i>both</i> a backend instance and a load balancer fail at the same time, which should be very rare. Clever!<p>As an aside, I couldn't help noticing these lines on adjacent pages:<p>> Maglev has been serving
Google’s traffic since 2008. It has sustained the rapid
global growth of Google services, and it also provides
network load balancing for Google Cloud Platform.<p>> Maglev handles
both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, and all the discussion
below applies equally to both.<p>In that case, any chance GCE will be getting IPv6 support soon? ;)