Keeping the Balance: Internet-Scale Loadbalancing Demystified

Monday, March 25, 2019 - 10:30 am11:00 am

Laura Nolan, Slack; Murali Suriar, Google

Abstract: 

Can you explain the entire path that an IP packet takes from your users to your binary? What about a web request? Do you understand the tradeoffs that different kinds of load balancing techniques make? If not, this talk is for you.

Load balancing is hard, and it is made up of many disparate technologies. It cuts across network, transport, and application layers. We'll describe different flavours of load balancing (network, naming, application) and how they are composed together by cloud providers and other large Internet companies to provide fast, reliable, multi-region services.

Laura Nolan, Slack

Laura Nolan's background is in Site Reliability Engineering, software engineering, distributed systems, and computer science. She wrote the 'Managing Critical State' chapter in the O'Reilly 'Site Reliability Engineering' book, as well as contributing to the more recent 'Seeking SRE'.

Murali Suriar, Google

Murali Suriar is a lapsed computer science graduate, turned network engineer, turned SRE. Currently working at Google running cluster filesystem and locking services. Left Google to get on a boat. Got bored and came back.

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BibTeX
@conference {229557,
author = {Laura Nolan and Murali Suriar},
title = {Keeping the Balance: {Internet-Scale} Loadbalancing Demystified},
year = {2019},
address = {Brooklyn, NY},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video