How Google looked to the past to develop a network for the future
When Google needed to expand its network beyond what could be supported by the commercial switches of the day, it looked back in time for a solution—deploying a decades-old architecture novel to the computer industry but widely used by telephone companies.
The company found that the Clos architecture, originally designed for telephones, also provided an effective way to connect large numbers of chatty servers, and paved the way for Google to build a single control plane to route all its traffic.
Going with Clos was one of the design choices that Google engineers will discuss Wednesday at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM (Special Interest Group on Data Communications) conference being held in London.
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