Google produces notoriously opaque and high-level articles with regard to its networking systems. You are not meant to get much meaning out of them. Instead you

Google produces notoriously opaque and high-level articles with regard to its networking systems. You are not meant to get much meaning out of them. Instead you should stand back in awe at the amazing things they are doing. Nearly every Google paper about Google networks in SIGCOMM is utter trash that would have been rejected in an instant due to lack of novel details if it had come from anyone else. They just brag about scale, utilization, and resiliency without actually giving anything back to the academic community. Note: This does not apply to all Google papers (e.g. spanner and other DB ones are pretty good). Their networking publications seem to be crippled by either IP concerns or poor academic writers.