OpenFlow @ Google - Urs Hoelzle, Google
Open Networking Summit1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2013–2015
talk · intermediate · 2013–2015 on HN
Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.
Cited as a primary source for Google building its own switches and running OpenFlow in production.
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4 comments from Hacker News
Honestly, everyday I'm continually impressed by posts describing the internal technology powering Google. Having an abstraction layer like this for global deployment couldn't be more convenient. With the news about Facebook the other day, I watched a talk on OpenFlow ( ▶ this video ) and the fact that they have a test suite they can plug into continuous integration in order to see if your commit breaks your application in any network situation is incredible. I'd love to sign an NDA and just talk to the teams working on these projects for hours. Truly impressive work.
>> >> You see, physical switch operating systems leave a lot to be desired in terms of supporting modern automation and API interaction (Juniper’s forthcoming 14.2 JUNOS updates offer some refreshing REST API’s!). >> This. Network hardware vendors have no incentive to make their devices more easily automated, and in fact face disincentive not to. There is actually a relatively established roadmap for the solution to this in "bare metal" / "white box" switches that essentially just talk OpenFlow to a controller. Google moved their entire international internal backbone (more traffic than public facing) to this model[1]. The issue at the moment is that there isn't lots of OS options and subsequently very little hardware support. Google developed their own hardware (despite preferring to have bought it[2]) and my understanding is they wrote their own software too. [1] link [2] ▶ this video
I may be a bit biased, because I'm a Googler... but looking through this thread and seeing all the people downplaying Google's contributions to Go, Android and Dart. As if they were minor... But what about all of the papers that have changed the way the world does computing? Some choice links below: MapReduce link BigTable link Dremel Paper link Chubby Paper link Urs Holzle on OpenFlow: ▶ this video Megastore Paper link Spanner Paper link Granted, some of these will take awhile before having implementations outside of Google... but you can't deny the impact of this work...
For those interested, Google has been using OpenFlow for some time now. This presentation by Urs Hölzle is about a year old: ▶ this video Slides: link