The Maglev software-defined load balancer, which runs on commodity Linux servers, has been critical to Google Cloud Platform for eight years, company says. As it’s already done with other areas of its massive datacenter infrastructure, Google this week gave enterprises a peek at Maglev,the software-defined network load balancer the company has been using since 2008 to handle traffic to Google services.Maglev, like most of Google’s networking systems, was built internally. But unlike Jupiter, the custom network fabric connecting Google’s data centers, Maglev runs on commodity Linux servers and does not require any specialized rack deployment, Google said in a blog post describing the technology.
According to Google, Maglev uses an approach known as Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) to distribute network packets evenly to all Maglev machines in a cluster.
