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How Google Wants to Rewire the Internet
- deegles 9y ago"one out of four bytes that are delivered to end users across the Internet originate from Google" Such a mind blowing statement. Wonder when (if) they'll hit one-in-three bytes.
- sofaofthedamned 9y agoFacebook or Amazon may have a say in that, a lot of those 1 in 4 bytes are video from Youtube. That said, those bytes still need to be delivered, Google really don't have peers in this stuff, apart from maybe Facebook.
- allannienhuis 9y agonetflix last year was reported at 37% in NA, so I suspect it will continue to be a contender as it gets more traction globally. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix-boasts-37-share-of-internet-traffic-in-north-america-compared-with-3-for-apples-itunes http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/20/netflix-boasts-37-... 'peak download internet traffic' whatever that means.
- sofaofthedamned 9y agoGood point. I'd be more interested in connection stats than bandwidth, that would far more fun to read.
- greenshackle2 9y agoTraffic during peak hours. Peak demand is what really matters for infrastructure.
- samstave 9y agoNeed to be able to store datafiles as youtube videos... e.g. ISO images in youtube vids... allowing for a view of a youtube vid to stream a download where, should everything be prioritized for vides/and youtube-google enuring play... that file transfers can be massive and fast even if neutrality BS occurs.
- eru 9y agoAt least for Google Photos, they don't usually give you the exact same bytes back. (At a very basic level, that protects against some attacks and also against your scheme.) Of course, you could add enough coding theory to make it work.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 9y agoThe content may be Netflix, but it's delivered over CDNs, and much of that infrastructure isn't operated by Netflix. That's what the "originate" in the original statement is likely implying. Content ownership and access vs content delivery at a network level.
- drewg123 9y agoWe (netflix) operate our own CDN. See https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
- kbenson 9y agoYes, but my understanding is that quite a bit of it is still served through partner CDN services, is it not? I was aware that Netflix served at least some of the content themselves (and growing, I assume), so was attempting to imply that the 37% noted for content access for Netflix may not equate exactly to 37% network delivery for Netflix, as they measure different things. I didn't mean to imply none of that should be attributed to Netflix's own network.
- drewg123 9y agoNo, we serve 100% of video traffic from our CDN.
- kbenson 9y agoAh, that seems to be fairly new. I found info that it was over 90% a little over a year ago[1], but I wasn't aware it was that high at that time either. Congratulations on getting everything self served! 1: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-with-isps-around-the-globe-to-deliver-a-great-viewing-experience https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
- drewg123 9y agoWe've been 100% for video since before I joined over 2 years ago. I think you misread that article with the 90%. That is talking about the proximity of Open Connect CDN nodes to customers, and how much traffic is served from "directly connected" Open Connect CDN nodes, and how much traffic is ... less than directly connected OpenConnect CDN nodes.. (sorry, I'm a kernel guy, not really versed in WAN stuff).
- johnsmith21006 9y agoYouTube doubled in hours of video watched last year going from 500m to 1 billion hours daily. FB total video is 100m hours. So Google added 5x FB total. Netflix was about 128 million hours daily. So Google should get to 1 out of 3 pretty quickly.
- kbenson 9y agoYoutube has some really good content creators, and apparently they are getting paid. I've actually subscribed to a few channels finally that I look forward to seeing new releases in (CGP Grey, YSAC). My 7yo son is obsessed with the whole Let's Play phenomenon, and other associated minecraft content. I've looked up some of these people on Social Blade[1][2], and some of these people are likely making millions, but I can't fault the system. While the content of some isn't exceptional, it is professional, and some of these people keep up that pace for multiple content releases each day. 1: https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/thediamondminecart https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/thediamondminecart 2: https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/matthiasiam https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/matthiasiam
- ben_jones 9y agoContent creators are mastering chopping up content into separate videos with enough continuity and hooks to keep people clicking next video, next video, next video... It's quite scary actually what the current and future generations are being conditioned to do.
- tonmoy 9y agoHave you heard of soap operas?
- linkregister 9y agoI agree the parent poster was being dramatic. Soap operas, however, make you wait until the following day to see what happened.
- tw04 9y agoWhat's mind blowing is that despite all that, they're still at the mercy of Comcast, Verizon, and at&t.
- slac 9y agoThat is a very US centric view of the world. Google operates far beyond Comcast Verizon and AT&T.
- sqeaky 9y agoPeople in the US have a disproportionate amount of money so serving them ads provides Google disproportionate value. Could they exist without the US market, Maybe, I don't know. But I can't imagine they want to go without it.
- neuronexmachina 9y ago> Wonder when (if) they'll hit one-in-three bytes. I guess if Netflix ever switched from AWS to Google Cloud Platform...
- rbranson 9y ago99% of Netflix bytes are largely served from Netflix's own CDN + a cadre of third party CDNs. The bytes to/from AWS isn't trivial by itself but relatively negligible compared to video traffic.
- mbreese 9y agoRight, I expect that the Netflix traffic numbers are for the last-mile only (CDN to customer). Google's numbers should be from a 1e100.net server to the customer across multiple networks (unless Youtube has some localized CDNs, which would complicate the math).
- getemback 9y agoGoogle's CDN is huge and extensive. See https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure
- icebraining 9y agoBoth Netflix and YouTube have appliances that they provide to ISPs to put inside their networks, serving as extremely local CDNs.
- delsarto 9y agoThere was a guy on Australian radio today saying that international traffic from Australia and NZ has decreased by about 70% over the past few years thanks to the ever-increasing usage of CDN's putting data, in most cases, within the ISPs network. Was something interesting I hadn't thought of. He also mentioned that in NZ miserly data caps are really not implemented any more, since people just aren't using expensive transits as much (any NZ people confirm?) Of course you wouldn't know about any of these savings by following the pricing of internet services in Australia. And the government seems intent on making anyone who cares for even basic privacy needing to tunnel their entire connection outside Australia (not to mention content providers and their geoblock rules).
- eternalban 9y agoGoogle must be broken up.
- weberc2 9y agoEspecially when you think of services like Netflix, Spotify, and online games which deliver lots of bytes that definitely don't originate from Google. Without these services, this must be closer to 1/2.
- snaily 9y agoAt least in the case of Spotify, I expect a large (and growing) chunk of their traffic to come from Google infrastructure: https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/ https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in...
- konpikwastaken 9y agoCan someone ELI5 the difference between this and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/? Is the technology principle the same?
- peterwwillis 9y agoExpressRoute is just Azure's version of AWS VPC. They're complicated VPNs for cloud services. Espresso is a system for controlling BGP peering using application-fed metrics. It's basically complicated source routing.
- konpikwastaken 9y agoThanks for the response. Couldn't ExpressRoute (and not familiar with AWS VPC) in theory be configured at multiple global locations to handle internet traffic?
- manigandham 9y agoAzure ExpressRoute = AWS Direct Connect = Google Cloud Interconnect All 3 are ways to connect your private datacenter or on-premise location (maybe your corporate office) directly to the cloud provider's network over a fast private link, like an industrial-sized VPN. This way you can access your cloud servers/services over this private connection rather than the public internet. Lots of companies do this if they have sensitive data or have their own "cloud" system running VMWare or something and want to augment with public providers. This article is discussing lower-level infrastructure describing Google's global network components, from load-balancing, routing, internal datacenter connections to servers, etc.
- lucb1e 9y agoThanks for explaining. Do you know if such a VPN is fundamentally different from something like OpenVPN, which can also be used site-to-site?
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- anth1988 9y agoIs it pessimistic to see a headline like this and assume it's another google power grab? > This could be one of those defining moments where Google shows the way and the world follows. But it will be one of those moments where the world follows because it's a great idea, or "because google does it".
- zzzcpan 9y agoI don't know, feels like a massive waste of resources and if Google is doing it simply because it can. It's probably much cheaper for everyone else to handle latency/throughput problems on the client side and application level, sticking to all the traditional networking, but not relying on it for quality. Even in the web browser we already can send all kinds of asynchronous requests to multiple servers in multiple datacenters, choosing the fastest response and making all kinds of decisions to where to send requests dynamically in real time. And while I agree about overcomplicated routers and box-centric thinking in computer networks, it's pretty much impossible to change things because of the monopolistic nature of the ISP industry. They are very far from competing on the levels of quality where SDN could matter.
- mjevans 9y agoFrom the description, it sounds like the routers have been reduced to more simple muxers, where a small tag added to the packet determines which port it goes over instead of trying to make a complicated decision all in one focal point. This has pushed the decision back from the routers to the servers, where it scales with the number of hosts handling connections and can additionally be determined per /session/ instead of per packet. That state is held where sessions already need to be stored anyway instead of being duplicated in a router where it's entirely a burden.
- dboreham 9y agoLabel switching is a pretty old concept. We had it at Inmos around 1990 and it wasn't new then.
- kingosticks 9y agoThe speedup from traditional MPLS already comes from the simple next-hop only lookup required by the router. There's no complicated decision making going on. Something central still manages the labels, that's the complexity but that's not new either. Google still buy and use a ton of traditional mega (tera) high bandwidth networking gear. All of which will support regular label switching. But that doesn't sound cool and exciting so they always play that down. They can spin it that way if they like, network hardware vendors don't care because they are still selling them their boxes.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emersonrsantos 9y ago> But running a fast, efficient, hyperscale network for internal datacenters is not sufficient for a good user experience It will never be sufficient. A good backbone infrastructure doesn't compensate for the fact that the majority of users don't have ISP choices especially for fast speed fixed/mobile networks.
- Ajedi32 9y agoHence, Google Fiber and Project Loon.
- eru 9y agoSomewhat related: Google's efforts to speed up TCP. "BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control" http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184
- komali2 9y agoI really wanted to understand this article. I tried wikipediaing and googling some of the things I didn't really get (Jupiter is a thing... ok and Andromeda.. riiiight). Then I got to the chart "Conceptually, here is how Espresso plugs into the Google networking stack:", which was totally unparseable by me. All the green things look the same, but one of them is the thing this article is about (Espresso, right?), and Google somehow is represented by a vague dark-grey blob... I just don't get it. Can anybody help? Am I simply not technically competent enough to consume this article yet?
- trafficlight 9y agoI really hate the naming trend over the past 10-15 years of using common words for projects. I can't really search for Espresso, or Jupiter, or Andromeda without additional qualifiers that I may not know yet.
- komali2 9y agoHeh, that for me culminated when windows released a ubuntu subsystem. The names in order of popularity when it was originally announced (now they push for WSL) 1. Bash for Ubuntu on Windows 2. Windows Bash Shell 3. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Trying googling WSL - it's world surf league. Windows Bash Shell is impossible, so is Bash for Ubuntu on Windows. It's getting better as more and more articles are being written, but god almighty. I wouldn't be surprised if google is lending a helping hand with searches for WSL stuff.
- Swizec 9y agoIt's a filter bubble issue. When I first started Ruby, it had been popular for 10+ years already. Many articles. Despite that, it was still impossible to search for. Look for Ruby, get gemstones. Look for gem, get even more gemstones. Eventually Google figured it out and now it's almost impossible to search for gemstones. If I search for gem almost all search results are about Ruby things. Same when searching for Ruby. Even "rails" now returns almost only Ruby on Rails stuff.
- pavement 9y agoI guess this planetary naming convention is part of a tie in with the notable Pluto Switch: https://www.wired.com/2013/03/big-switch-indigo-switch_light/ https://www.wired.com/2013/03/big-switch-indigo-switch_light... https://www.wired.com/2012/09/pluto-switch/ https://www.wired.com/2012/09/pluto-switch/
- ComodoHacker 9y ago>Amin Vahdat: Yup, pretty much traffic directors. Absolutely. This quote stands out for me and makes me uneasy.