On the Application of Amazon Web Services
Filed under Notices · Tagged AWS, Datacenter
The Society has received, by way of public press release and certain private overtures, an application from Amazon Web Services for membership. The application took the form of an announcement that Amazon had become “the first hyperscaler to build a flat data center network using random graph theory.” The implication, sufficiently clear to those who understood it, was that the Society would be obliged to take notice.
The Society has taken notice.
A review committee was convened. Two of its three members were never informed of the matter. The findings are reproduced below.
The architecture in question is named Resilient Network Graphs. It is constructed of a randomized optical mesh, connected by passive devices called ShuffleBoxes, and traversed by a proprietary distributed routing protocol of Amazon’s design called Spraypoint. The marketing materials describe the result as flat.
The Society is obliged to observe the following.
A network in which packets are forwarded according to the decisions of a distributed routing protocol is, by definition, layer three. The presence of routing implies the presence of routing tables. The presence of routing tables implies the presence of a control plane. The Society’s third tenet is sufficiently clear on the matter of the control plane.
A topology may be random. The addressing may not.
That the optical fabric beneath is unstructured does not address the question. ShuffleBoxes shuffle photons. Photons do not know about the network. The network is built above them by Spraypoint, and Spraypoint is a routing protocol, and routing is hierarchical, and hierarchy is the opposite of the thing claimed.
The Society does not deny that AWS has built something. The Society denies that what AWS has built is flat. The application is declined.
The Society notes, without comment, that engineers of Amazon Web Services continue to be welcome to attend the conferences at which members of the Society may, from time to time, also be present. The Society does not recognize the conferences, but the conferences exist.
An external account of the matter is available, for those who require one.
This matter is closed.
