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Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350B IT market
- ianai 9y agoActually what's stopping switch and router configuration from being something a local shop does for other local shops? At this point both the software and hardware aspects appear to be generic enough to be do-able. It also buys a local company really good local service. (Or,at least the potential for it.) My thinking is if many companies can do it internally above a large enough scale then it may be a service opportunity for smaller entities.
- res0nat0r 9y agoAmazon's already done this and replaced expensive Cisco Nexus routers with their home grown in house creations. Big hardware networking equipment vendors are going to continue to see this type of encroachment from large IT companies IMO.
- aibottle 9y agoIf I recall correctly Google built its own network gear long time ago. Completely makes sense. Looking at Cisco product with regard to security & the recent NSA leaks you really don't want your network gear from them.
- holydude 9y agoWhat makes you think they can do it better in terms of security? In my opinion it is a matter of costs and trying to solve a specific problem.
- dsr_ 9y agoThink of it in the same terms as any other service you're contemplating: do you want to pay other people for proprietary stuff, or do you want to pay your own people to develop skills around open stuff? cisco has an incentive to not look foolish, but they don't particularly care about any small or mid-size accounts. Your people have an incentive to care about your security and functionality. Weigh up the advantages and disadvantages and make your choice appropriately.
- aibottle 9y agoWell mostly because they don't rely on any legacy code base but they can write it all by themselves. Also Google has somewhat of an reputation for security other than Cisco.
- astrodust 9y agoGoogle can better control their designs and supply chain than Cisco. Cisco's priorities are more directly profits. Google's are often more security related, though they can profit from being more secure.
- SCHiM 9y agoThey can better control their supply chain maybe, but still not good enough if/when they're up against state sponsored espionage.
- bastawhiz 9y agoAnd you think Cisco devices are better equipped against state-sponsored espionage?
- astrodust 9y agoI think they're worse off since they're manufactured abroad to known specifications.
- mlangdon 9y agoThe big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call. Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.
- stargrazer 9y agoActually, Google has published papers and have presented talks (many of which are available on Youtube) on the type of gear they have developed. I don't know what their latest versions are, but recently they were using OpenFlow style infrastructure to provided fine-grained control (security, balancing, analysis) over flows through out their network. OpenFlow style constructs also provide a micro-segmentation style control (ie distributed firewall) over ingress/egress of traffic at the individual container/vm port level.
- vgt 9y agoGoogle rolling its own hardware is a key security pillar. This is a good read on the topic: https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper (work at G)
- jgalt212 9y agoyes, sounds a lot like the roll your own crypto conundrum.
- brianwawok 9y agoAt Google scale you can roll your own crypto. Or routers. Or hardware. Or CPU. Maybe not smart to roll your own everything, but a few of them sure.
- astrodust 9y agoI doubt they'd roll their own, but I bet Google has the talent to make very good implementations of proven crypto.
- dsacco 9y agoGoogle has the talent to roll its own crypto, and in fact it often does.
- tptacek 9y agohttps://github.com/google/tink https://github.com/google/tink Note the authors.
- astrodust 9y agoThat's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Good implementations of known-good crypto. I don't doubt that Google's trying to come up with new, novel cryptographic methods as well, but those take a long time to develop, test, and get reviewed. RSA didn't show up over-night and SHA3 has taken some time to get ready for production.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eddyg 9y agoAny links with details? The Nexus is a pretty capable switch with a lot of media options...
- mtmail 9y agoPresentation including AWS custom router hardware from re:Invent 2016 https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=23m15s https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=23m15s
- wmf 9y agoBut Amazon doesn't want a pretty capable switch with a lot of media options; they probably want one capability (IP routing) and one or two types of media.
- mmmBacon 9y agoThis Exactly. Companies like Amazon, Google, FB, Microsoft need 10% of those features. However oftentimes there's a bug in the 90% of the software that they don't use which impacts something in the 10% they do use. This causes a long delay in the roll out of fixes and creates a lot of disruption in scaling out the network. Furthermore Cisco must test all those features before they can ship a new product. This results in delay of new physical layer technology into the network. What the big 4 want is that new tech to get to market faster so they can keep up with the demand. The problem ultimately is the pace of network technology is not keeping up with the demand of the webscales.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deepnotderp 9y agoLots of companies have already done this, pretty much all the hyperscalers have merchant silicon based networking switches. What makes Amazon unique is that they built their own networking chips
- kuschku 9y ago> Plus, German telecom equipment maker ADVA Optical Networking is manufacturing the device and, as of a few weeks ago had nine customers trying it out for their telecom needs, a mix of big telecom companies and enterprises, it said. That actually sounds a lot better, as it means Facebook isn’t actually manufacturing it, and it’s harder for a security agency to inject into it (although there will obviously still be spies)
- wmf 9y agoWhat are you saying, that security agencies can infiltrate Facebook but not ADVA's supply chain?
- kuschku 9y agoI'm saying that it's easier to infiltrate something that isn't 6000km away.
- solotronics 9y agoI'm actually pretty surprised it's Adva as their software CLI sucks hard on the smaller devices I have used.
- dkarapetyan 9y agoHas OCP been really that successful? How many data centers are actually using their design?
- stargrazer 9y agoFacebook was the one who started the OCP (Open Compute Platform) concept. Quite a number of companies have climbed on board. And there is a yearly conference in the March time frame in where quite a number of companies get together and show hardware based upon the open standards and concepts developed through OCP.
- astrodust 9y agoThis is what RIM/Blackberry should have done when they were the most trusted name in telecom. They could've bought Nortel and made a juggernaut.
- pedalpete 9y agoDoes this not also somewhat mean this is what Nortel should have done? What did RIM bring to the table that Nortel didn't have, or was this related to the timing, where Nortel was already in the gutter and RIM was still flying high?
- wmf 9y agoCompanies tend to get punished for reducing margins; this discourages self-disruption.
- astrodust 9y agoTiming related. Nortel over-extended themselves in the 1990s by making a bunch of acquisitions related to networking. RIM could've bailed them out or acquired the company outright since they were very strong financially until just after 2008. Remember, when the iPhone launched RIM was at their peak strength and Nortel was a forgotten husk.
- perlpimp 9y agothis is essentially an apache model or how it came to be. some of internet providers created and funded apache foundation to make a decent webserver that was flexible and reasonably fast, in terms of how fast a C based webserver can be.
- mediocrejoker 9y agoI'm not too familiar with the design of apache but I believe nginx is also written in C. I'm curious about your comment because generally C is regarded as being the wrong choice for any given project for several reasons but speed is not one of them. Are there other languages that are enabling faster web servers?