
Google Caching Overview - anand-s
https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html
======
pavs
I own a small ISP in SEA, Bandwidth from ggc is about 70% of our traffic
(mostly youtube). While we don't have GGC ourselves yet, our upstream does and
we have peering with them. Its amazing, how much of the actual "Internet" goes
through GGC. We also have akamai peering, which handles about 10% of our
traffic.

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jlgaddis
Are you at SIX? I'd guess there's at least one of these there, if Google
themselves aren't connected. I'd wager Akamai and Netflix are at SIX too.

~~~
pavs
whats SIX?

We are at SEA (South East Asia) :)

GGC's are everywhere, its relatively easy to get, other than proper business
paperworks the onle requirement is to have decent bw, I think minimum 1gbps
Google BW.

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chinathrow
Similar to what other providers of original content do, e.g. Netflix.

I wonder, if local cache setups would have different impact on jurisdiction,
taxes and such. Google is known to always say you deal with Ireland, e.g.
outside of the US but what if the cache is local?

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codewithcheese
Does Netflix have caching beyond AWS data centers?

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acdha
Yes:

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/peeringLocations/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/peeringLocations/)

This was somewhat famously part of the network neutrality debate because
certain large ISPs were trying to claim that their customers were transferring
too much from Netflix and thus needed to be double-billed but those same ISPs
refused to install the free OpenConnect servers which would have reduced that
traffic.

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brohoolio
My understanding though is that if you have an open connect box on your
network it can act as a DDOS, stressing all your infrastructure closer to the
customers. Netflix eats all bandwidth.

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acdha
That's not a DDOS – it's called “actually delivering the service your
customers paid for”. If you've underprovisioned your network, that might be a
problem but it's not an attack.

It's also something of a best-case scenario because the only party affected is
the same party which has the ability to fix the problem: since it's on your
network, you can add additional capacity or institute some sort of fair-
queuing without the need to negotiate with outside companies.

~~~
chinathrow
I imagine the Open Connect box would do automatic bitrate tuning for all users
on that network for immediate mitigation and notify obviously Netflix and the
open connect ISP for long term capacity management.

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jlgaddis
Anyone know if Google will allow these to be installed at IXPs? $work (ISP)
likely isn't large enough to warrant having one of these on our network but a
bunch of us smaller ISPs all peer together at a private IXP (in Indianapolis)
and our collective traffic levels almost certainly justify it.

Then again, with tens of gigabits to Chicago (where Google has a major
datacenter) it probably isn't really necessary.

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asuffield
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody
else. I'm an SRE at Google, and my team is implicated in this infrastructure.)

This stuff is designed to be able to go almost anywhere that's willing to host
it under the standard contract. File a request, let the relevant team figure
out if it's worth putting a rack in. Nothing bad can happen as a result of
asking the question.

(Ah, "major datacenter" in Chicago. It's bad of me to be amused by this. We
don't have anything we'd call a "datacenter" in Chicago, that's a small
installation ;). The list is here:
[http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/](http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/))

~~~
jlgaddis
Yeah, sorry, I know there isn't a "real" Google datacenter there (too late to
"s/datacenter/presence/" on my original comment now). I don't technically have
any of my own datacenters, but I'm present in a few, just like you guys have a
"major" (to me) presence.

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dzhiurgis
In YouTube if you right-click on video you get 'Stats for nerds'. Does anyone
know how to translate the stream hostname to actual IP / geolocation?

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temal
${hostname}.googlevideo.com

$ dig r1---sn-4g57knez.googlevideo.com +short r1.sn-4g57knez.googlevideo.com.
173.194.6.166

The videos are split among a couple of domains/hosts. uMatrix gives a nice
overview over the used domains.

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dlss
Is this what AppEngine apps / Google cloud storage files are served from, or
is that a different CDN?

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jlgaddis
That data would be served from Google's own datacenters.

To be as efficient as possible, these devices would only serve content that is
accessed by many users (e.g.: popular Youtube videos).

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stereokai
From
[https://peering.google.com/iwantggc](https://peering.google.com/iwantggc):

"GGC is implemented as a set of servers deployed in your datacenter, remotely
managed by Google."

Basically you're leading the greedy little boy Google by the hand to the back
door of your house, unlocking the door, and going on about your business.
"Don't you go in now, kid".

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txutxu
I don't know who down-voted you and why.

This other product has been around since many years ago (pre Snowden), and
people has been connecting it to intranets, BI systems, etc:

    
    
        https://www.google.es/intx/en/work/search/products/gsa.html
    

More on the same to think about what you commented.

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acdha
It's just evidence-free conspiracy babble and you're making it worse by
mentioning Snowden in a misleading attempt to imply they're working with
rather than, as Snowden showed, being attacked by the NSA.

More broadly, however, these things are cache nodes – putting one in a data
center makes sense but that's not saying you need to give it the privileged
access stereokai implied. The win comes from deploying it on the same physical
network but you'd still want to firewall it like public internet traffic.

