alt Hacker NewsWhat gave you that idea? Internally, Google uses GRE/GENEVE-like stuff but for reasons that have nothing to do with "preventing compromise" or whatever, but because they're carrying metadata (traces, latency budgets, billing ids.) That is to say, encapsulation is just transport. It's pretty much L3 semantics all the way down... In fact, this is more or less the point: L2 is intractable at scale, as broadcast/multicast doesn't work. However, it's hard to find comparisons to anything you're familiar with at Google scale. They have a myriad of proprietary solutions and custom protocols for routing, even though it's all L3 semantics. To learn more:
Andromeda https://research.google/pubs/andromeda-performance-isolation...
Orion https://research.google/pubs/orion-googles-software-defined-...
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What gave me that idea? Talks and research papers from Google network engineers over the past decade.
The last time I was there, there were many layers of encap, including MPLS, GRE, PSP, with very tightly managed MTU. Traffic engineering was mostly SDN-managed L3, but holy hell was it complex. Considering that Google (at the time) carried more traffic than the rest of the Internet combined, maybe it was worth it.