Is the Facebook DC Architecture right for you?
A few weeks ago Facebook announced their new datacenter architecture in a post on their network engineering blog. Facebook is one of the few large web scale companies that is fairly open about their network architecture and designs and it gives many others the opportunity to see how a network can be scaled, even though the scale is well beyond what most will need in the foreseeable future, if not forever.
In the post, Alexey walks through some of the thought process behind the architecture, which is ultimately the most important part of any architecture and design. Too often we simply build whatever seems to be popular or common, or mandated/pushed by a specific vendor. The network however is a product, a deliverable, and has requirements like just about anything else we produce.
Facebook’s and the other web properties’ scale is at a different order of magnitude from most everyone else, but their requirements should sound pretty familiar to many:
- Intra DC traffic is significantly higher than inter DC or DC to Internet traffic
- “machine to machine traffic – is several orders of magnitude larger than what goes out to the Internet”
- Build for growth, the network is not a Continue reading
So with some triumph and minor exhaustion, I completed Etherealmind’s 30 Blogs in 30 Days challenge; but so what? Does it change anything? Do I get a prize?
