SPEAKER: This is a story about networking.
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Once upon a time, when you wanted
to set up a private network or a subnet
to host your workloads in the Cloud,
you had to construct a Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC,
contained to just one region.
This was OK, as long as you were only managing two or three.
But scaling up became really hard
because you needed VPNs between each region
to keep your traffic secure, and this meant longer wait times.
At Google, we imagined a single global VPC,
where VMs and regional subnets could communicate privately
across the world.
And all of this without going through a VPN.
And then we built it.
This global VPC approach allowed for simplicity at scale,
empowering businesses to add subnet after subnet
without a resulting network that was too unwieldy to manage.
For network professionals who lived in both worlds,
the difference is, well, noticeable.
Just ask anybody who spent time stitching together
VPN gateway after gateway.
Ask anybody who's had to pinpoint
the source of a network problem in a system of localized VPCs
when something breaks.
Or anybody who's had to manage security policies
for those different VPCs.
Or anyone trying to maintain clear segregation
of their engineers access to each network.
When you use Google's network, you'll
reap all the benefits of scaling without any of these drawbacks.
So, what makes this all possible?
Originally, we built our own network
because, quite simply, we couldn't buy for any price
the scale and performance we needed.
So what did we have to do differently
to solve for this scale and performance
when designing our own network?
A big part of the answer?
Tail latency.
When you're doing any kind of distributed computation,
you don't just care about how fast you can
get the data most of the time.
You care about what happens to the speed at the tail end
of the distribution.
To understand why, suppose you have a computation that
starts at one server, collects data, and doesn't
finish until it collects data from 1,000 more servers.
If even one of those servers returns your query
significantly later than the rest,
well, the speed of your computation
is only as fast as the slowest server.
But at Google, by guaranteeing that the worst case is
very close to the best case, we design our network
for what matters most--
predictability.
It's this network and the philosophy driving it
that allows us to treat your hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of servers as one unit of computation.
One collective brain talking to itself
across locations around the globe.
And what does this mean for you?
When designing services for your customers,
you get to assume low latency.
In large part, this is thanks to best-in-class global load
balancing services, which support
one-million-plus queries per second.
Traffic enters Cloud Global Load Balancing
through 80-plus distinct global load balancing locations,
meaning your traffic primarily stays
on Google's fast private network backbone instead
of public internet service providers.
And naturally, this design can accommodate
huge unexpected spikes in traffic.
So when your app becomes a crowd favorite overnight,
our network intelligently directs traffic
to VM instances that can be configured
to spin up automatically in a matter of seconds.
In other words, we're not just hoping your business will grow,
we're counting on it.
Of course, we also know that one size doesn't fit all,
and that there will always be a few niche
cases where you might still want to set up
a separate regional VPC.
So we built that option right in.
With Google's network, you can take advantage
of our global VPC when it makes sense,
and go the traditional route when you need to.
If you're ready to see for yourself,
head to cloud.google.com.
But the story doesn't end there.
There's so much more we could say about networks.
Actually, we created a whole series,
Cloud Networking End-To-End, dedicated to answering all
the questions you've ever had about networking,
and some you didn't.
Ever wondered how to set up your own VPC
on Google Cloud, hybrid connectivity, firewall rules,
or external load balancers?
So be sure to check out Cloud Networking End-To-End, as well
as a bunch of other great content
on the Google Cloud Platform YouTube channel.
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