Maglev: The Load Balancer behind Google’s Infrastructure (Architectural Overview)— Part 1/3
An article by Forbes in 2013 showed that about 40% of internet traffic flows through Google’s network infrastructure. Not all the traffic may be destined for Google’s popular services such as GMail or Search but when it is, Google’s services get bombarded with millions requests per second from all across the globe. Whenever you try Google search for your favorite dragon photo, or use Maps to find out where Timbuktu is, your request travels through a variety of network infrastructure before getting to backend service you requested. The man in the middle intelligently shuffling all the traffic to the appropriate backend is Maglev, the name for Google’s Distributed Load Balancer (LB). If you’re not too familiar with Load Balancers and what they do check out my previous article where I give an overview of them.
In order to cover this beast that is Maglev, I have opted to break it down into 3 separate articles that build on each other.
Article 1 (this article): looks to give an overview of Maglev and fundamental components of its architecture.
Article 2: Will take a look inside Maglev in particular how the forwarder works.
Article 3: The novel and intelligent implementations that have made Maglev so successful.
