Maglev Load Balancers
Maglev is the codename of Google’s Layer 4 network load balancer, which is referred to in GCP as External TCP/UDP Network Load Balancing. I read the 2016 Maglev paper to better understand various implementation details of Maglev with an emphasis on security (in particular as affects availability). Maglev uses a scale-out approach, implemented within clusters built from commodity hardware achieving n+1 redundancy, providing greater tolerance to failure compared with traditional hardware load balancers deployed in pairs (only 1+1 redundancy). The collection of Maglev machines are in an active-active setup, with the router balancing across them via Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) routing. This permits greater hardware utilization compared to an active-passive approach. ...