Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Google is notoriously secretive about its data centers, but Facebook, a well-known technology company, is not. Recently, the social media giant released two important tools in an open source way-- which were once used only internally.

One is Katran, a load balancer that keeps the company's data center from being overloaded. It is open source under the GNU General Public license v2.0 and is available on GitHub. In addition to Katran, the company provides detailed information about Zero Touch Provisioning tool, a tool that helps engineers automate most of the work they need to build a backbone network.

This is not the first time Facebook has tried open source software. Last month, the company released the source code for PyTorch, a software used in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning projects. PyTorch is a python-based package for writing tensor calculations and deep neural networks accelerated using GPU.

Such packages must be developed by Facebook, and while there are many off-the-shelf software products on the market, none of them is developed for a global social media company with 2 billion users.

Details of the Facebook load balancing tool

The news comes from the blog of Nikita Shirokov, a production engineer at Facebook, and Ranjeeth Dasineni, a software engineer. The two people said the company had previously developed its own load balancing software, mainly based on open source software. Over the past four years, it has provided good service, but with the passage of time, it has begun to show its limitations.

They wrote that the load balancer must meet four criteria: it must run on a normal Linux server; coexist with other services on a given server, eliminating the need for a dedicated load balancing server; allowing low-disruption maintenance; and simple instrument installation and debugging.

Shirokov and Dasineni say their first software-defined load balancer, called layer 4 load balancer (Layer 4 load balancer or L4LB for short), is inadequate when coexisting with other service standards, especially the back end.

"in the second iteration, we used the eXpress Data Path (XDP) framework and the new BPF virtual machine (eBPF) to run the software load balancer, as well as the back end on a large number of machines." They wrote.

Details of the zero-contact service enablement tool for Facebook

The details behind Facebook's zero-touch service enablement (ZTP,Zero Touch Provisioning) tool also come from a blog post written by some engineers at Facebook about three weeks ago. ZTP allows you to automatically provide new switches and routers in your network without human intervention.

For a company the size of Facebook, it has to build its own network, which is why it needs a ZTP tool. Like load balancing, the company found that existing ZTP tools were insufficient to handle the scale of the business that Facebook was running.

"in the end, these challenges prompted Facebook network engineers to develop an entirely new approach to network deployment workflow." The blogger said.

So it creates a new framework called Vending Machine ("vending machine"), only here, enter the device role, location, and platform, instead of putting in a coin and getting a drink. ZTP is still in development, and Facebook is also adding new features and functions.

Facebook has not disclosed the license for ZTP. Like Katran, if you decide to use these tools, you're on your own. A "kind" Facebook engineer may help answer some of the questions encountered in use, but officials may not provide supporting documentation or the like. Therefore, the author is also very curious who will really use these software, because they are not the "dish" of small and medium-sized enterprises. It seems to be designed for large enterprises, and most large enterprises have their own platforms. Of course, this is only one side of the story, not absolute.

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