Adjunct CSE Professor Divulges Google’s Network Strategy

This week Google partially lifted the curtain of secrecy surrounding the homegrown network architecture it built over the past decade to handle the massive amount of Internet traffic through the search giant’s servers. To divulge the details, Google selected an adjunct CSE professor to go public. Amin Vahdat, who started advising Google while he was still teaching at UC San Diego and leading the university’s Center for Networked Systems (CNS), is now a full-time Google Fellow and Technical Lead for Networking at the company, and he remains an adjunct member of the CSE faculty.

Vahdat gave a presentation at the 2015 Open Network Summit on June 17, “revealing for the first time the details of five generations of our in-house network technology,” according to Google. While Vahdat was careful about not divulging too many proprietary details, he presented a first look into Google’s data center network design and implementation, focusing on the data, control and management plane principles underpinning five generations of our network architecture.”