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

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