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Outlier or Leader? Learning from Google's Andromeda SDN
by Brian Boyko, Technology Contributor - June 4, 2014
A bit like how physics breaks down when you start talking about the supermassive black holes, all the conventional wisdom about best practices regarding SDN deployment goes out the window when you start talking about the outliers of the biggest companies.
There's a very good reason that "Google" was named after a really big number.
Google, and companies like them (Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) who have super-large, complex network infrastructures, face challenges that 99.99% of enterprises will never have. It makes financial sense for them to invest in custom technologies to address their unique challenges and give them competitive advantages. Not surprisingly then, their SDN deployments are full of unique, in-house solutions to unique, in-house problems.
Google's SDN is codenamed Andromeda, and not only is it used with Google's own servers but also in two zones of Google’s IaaS, Compute Engine.
As Google’s Cloud Platform Blog states, its virtual network has to compete with the physical network when it comes to performance, availability, and security. This has to be done "across virtual machines, hypervisors, operating systems, network interface Continue reading