Taking the Edge off with Espresso: Scale, Reliability and Programmability for Global Internet Peering

Calvin Ying
TaeEun Kim
Matthew Holliman
Ashok Narayanan
Colin Rice
Puneet Sood
Mukarram Tariq
Gary Baldus
Dzevad Trumic
Victor Lin
Bert Tanaka
Manish Verma
Brian Rogan
Vytautas Valancius
Mahesh Kallahalla
Marcus Hines
Sigcomm (2017)

Abstract

We present the design of Espresso, Google’s SDN-based Internet peering edge routing infrastructure. This architecture grew out of a need to exponentially scale the Internet edge cost-effectively and to
enable application-aware routing at Internet-peering scale. Espresso utilizes commodity switches and host-based routing/packet processing to implement a novel fine-grained traffic engineering capability.
Overall, Espresso provides Google a scalable peering edge that is programmable, reliable, and integrated with global traffic systems. Espresso also greatly accelerated deployment of new networking features at our peering edge. Espresso has been in production for two years and serves over 22% of Google’s total traffic to the Internet.