[SEJeff]

Regardless of what people think of facebook and their business, this is a pretty big deal. As a very large tech company, they have the time and talent to develop their own switches. If they are releasing the reference implementations, unlike google, this helps anyone else trying to build the next big web company. The more information the merrier.

[tambourine_man]

Yes, but only because they lag behind Google in this regard. Companies embrace and propose open standards in the areas they don't dominate. As soon as you hit a core competitive advantage, they get as closed as possible.

[randartie]

It's not because they don't "dominate" in the area of building network hardware that they release their designs. It's because this is not what gives Facebook an advantage in the social products space.

There aren't better social networks out there that would thrive if only they had better network switches.

[planckscnst]

I'm not so sure of this. Google has published multiple documents [1] mentioning the limitation of top-of-rack switching capacity and data center bisection bandwidth: how they need to design around it, and why it makes sense to use commodity switches despite the burden on software design.

[1] Here is one less than a year old: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y2...

[magicalist]

I didn't read it to see what you were referring to, but that's the second edition of an older book, so maybe they didn't update everything for the new edition. Google has been banging the software-defined networking drum for a while now (configuration is part of the compute engine APIs now, for instance[1]).

[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/04/enter-androm...

[planckscnst]

Yes, I just looked at the place where it specifically talks about switching costs (chapter 1 around page 18/19), and it hasn't changed.