Low-margin optical networking at cloud scale [Invited]

Every day, customers across the globe connect to cloud service provider servers with requests for diverse types of data, requiring instantaneous response times and seamless availability. The physical infrastructure which underpins those services is based on optics and optical networks, with the focus of this paper being on Microsoft’s approach to the optical network. Maintaining a global optical networking infrastructure which meets these customer needs means Microsoft must utilize solutions which are highly tailored and optimized for the application space which they address, with appropriately streamlined solutions for metropolitan data center interconnect and long-haul portions of the network. This paper presents Microsoft’s approach for tackling these challenges at cloud scale, highlighting the low-margin solutions which are employed. We provide a survey of Microsoft’s regional network design and corresponding optical network architectures, and present volumes of real-time polled metrics from the thousands of lines systems and tens of thousands of transceivers deployed today. We close by describing our approach to a unified software-defined networking toolset which ultimately enables the velocity and scale with which we can grow and operate this critical network infrastructure.