Building networks that serve millions or even billions of people presents a set of complex, and often unprecedented, engineering challenges.
Networking @Scale, the latest iteration of the @Scale conference series, brought together speakers from Facebook, Fastly, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Netflix, and more than 350 people from the networking community, to openly discuss these challenges and collaborate on the development of new solutions. The conversations throughout the day ranged from data center hardware and fabric, to cloud networking and CDNs, to low-latency trading networks and application protocols such as SPDY.
Check out the talks below to hear from some of the industry’s leading voices on networking solutions that scale.
Extending SDN to the Management Plane
Featuring: Anees Shaikh, Staff Network Architect, Google
In this talk, we heard about Google’s OpenConfig and the need for a network configuration framework guided by software-defined networking principles, with a focus on developing common models of network devices, and common languages to describe network structure and policies.
Building Low-Latency, High-Performance Trading Networks
Featuring: Michael Payne, Cloud Development, JPMorgan Chase
Attendees heard Michael discuss building trading networks that can cater to different asset types with different characteristics and connectivity requirements. This talk explored end-to-end trading architecture, including components such as exchange connectivity, collocation and interconnect points, low-latency optical and microwave networks, cut-through vs. buffered switches, and host components such as FPGAs, GPUs, and offload NIC cards. (Note: Video is not available for this session.)
Facebook Data Center Network
Facebook’s engineers delivered an exciting three-part talk in which we announced “6-pack,” the first open hardware modular switch. You can read more about “6-pack” here.
Engineering Facebook’s Data Center Network: Challenges and Limitations
Featuring: Najam Ahmad, VP of Network Engineering, Facebook
Introducing “6-pack,” the First Open Hardware Modular Switch
Featuring: Yuval Bachar, Hardware Engineer, Facebook
Facebook’s Data Center Fabric
Featuring: Alexey Andreyev, Network Engineer, Facebook
CDN Scaling Challenges
Featuring: Artur Bergman, CEO, Fastly
This talk dove into how Fastly built a highly performant, real-time CDN that was reliable and scalable, and explored the building blocks that made it possible.
Synchronous Geo-Replication over Azure Tables
Featuring: Albert Greenberg, Distinguished Engineer and Director of Microsoft Azure Networking, Microsoft
This talk covered the design principles, key elements of implementation, and future work applications of Azure Tables at Microsoft, and included a live demo of RTable.
Scaling the Netflix Global CDN, Lessons Learned from Terabit Zero
Featuring: Dave Temkin, Director of Global Networks, Netflix
Netflix is responsible for 35 percent of North American bandwidth. In this talk, we heard about how they built their CDNs at scale.
Mobile Networking Challenges
Featuring: Peter Griess, Software Engineer, Facebook
The final talk of the day focused on mobile networking challenges, and we heard about the work that Facebook is doing to develop and implement scalable solutions.
