3 ms·
From 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 ov
by mjevans 9y ago
From 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.
- johnsmith21006 9y agoYou really do no understand what Google is doing or how it works. The article does a poor job explaining. It is more like a virtual circuit switch network. It enables far less cost in equipment as no need to over provision. But a key feature is it makes latency far more determinate. This was necessary to make Spanner work.