> > I would not be surprised if just making your own NICs and switches is cheaper once you hit a certain deployment size. > Ideas you’ll never hear at Google o

> > I would not be surprised if just making your own NICs and switches is cheaper once you hit a certain deployment size. > Ideas you’ll never hear at Google or meta You'd be surprised. Google has a very strong tradition of "not-invented here" which extends to some of our production networking gear as well. To be fair, at the time, some of this was justified because the available devices on the market couldn't support our use cases back then. Per section 3.2 of the 2013 B4 paper [0]: Even so, the main reason we chose to build our own hardware was that no existing platform could support an SDN deployment, i.e., one that could export low-level control over switch forwarding behavior. Any extra costs from using custom switch hardware are more than repaid by the e›fficiency gains available from supporting novel services such as centralized TE. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/b4-sigcomm13.pdf https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~vahdat/papers/b4-sigcomm13.pdf