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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's already done this and replaced expensive Cisco Nexus routers with their home grown in house creations. Big hardware networking equipment vendors are going to continue to see this type of encroachment from large IT companies IMO.

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If I recall correctly Google built its own network gear long time ago. Completely makes sense. Looking at Cisco product with regard to security & the recent NSA leaks you really don't want your network gear from them.

What makes you think they can do it better in terms of security? In my opinion it is a matter of costs and trying to solve a specific problem.

Google can better control their designs and supply chain than Cisco.

Cisco's priorities are more directly profits. Google's are often more security related, though they can profit from being more secure.

They can better control their supply chain maybe, but still not good enough if/when they're up against state sponsored espionage.

The big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call.

Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.

Actually, Google has published papers and have presented talks (many of which are available on Youtube) on the type of gear they have developed. I don't know what their latest versions are, but recently they were using OpenFlow style infrastructure to provided fine-grained control (security, balancing, analysis) over flows through out their network. OpenFlow style constructs also provide a micro-segmentation style control (ie distributed firewall) over ingress/egress of traffic at the individual container/vm port level.

An organization whose job it is to infiltrate hostile governments and intelligence agencies should have no problem infiltrating Google.

And you think Cisco devices are better equipped against state-sponsored espionage?

I think they're worse off since they're manufactured abroad to known specifications.

Google is a publicly traded company. The primary focus is always enhancing shareholder value.

Ah shareholder value. Value is the keyword. It's not shareholder money per se. If a companies stock jumps because people think you are bold for making your own secure network equipment then you have created value. Security and privacy can make value. Look at Apple. Public perception of Apple makes up a nice part of their stock and it's based around (just to name some smaller ones) privacy and security.

Better get on the phone with Jeff Bezos because he missed that memo.

Well mostly because they don't rely on any legacy code base but they can write it all by themselves. Also Google has somewhat of an reputation for security other than Cisco.

Google rolling its own hardware is a key security pillar. This is a good read on the topic:

https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper

(work at G)

Think of it in the same terms as any other service you're contemplating: do you want to pay other people for proprietary stuff, or do you want to pay your own people to develop skills around open stuff?

cisco has an incentive to not look foolish, but they don't particularly care about any small or mid-size accounts. Your people have an incentive to care about your security and functionality. Weigh up the advantages and disadvantages and make your choice appropriately.

yes, sounds a lot like the roll your own crypto conundrum.

At Google scale you can roll your own crypto. Or routers. Or hardware. Or CPU.

Maybe not smart to roll your own everything, but a few of them sure.

I doubt they'd roll their own, but I bet Google has the talent to make very good implementations of proven crypto.

https://github.com/google/tink

Note the authors.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Good implementations of known-good crypto.

I don't doubt that Google's trying to come up with new, novel cryptographic methods as well, but those take a long time to develop, test, and get reviewed. RSA didn't show up over-night and SHA3 has taken some time to get ready for production.

Google has the talent to roll its own crypto, and in fact it often does.

Lots of companies have already done this, pretty much all the hyperscalers have merchant silicon based networking switches.

What makes Amazon unique is that they built their own networking chips

Any links with details? The Nexus is a pretty capable switch with a lot of media options...

But Amazon doesn't want a pretty capable switch with a lot of media options; they probably want one capability (IP routing) and one or two types of media.

This Exactly. Companies like Amazon, Google, FB, Microsoft need 10% of those features. However oftentimes there's a bug in the 90% of the software that they don't use which impacts something in the 10% they do use. This causes a long delay in the roll out of fixes and creates a lot of disruption in scaling out the network. Furthermore Cisco must test all those features before they can ship a new product. This results in delay of new physical layer technology into the network. What the big 4 want is that new tech to get to market faster so they can keep up with the demand. The problem ultimately is the pace of network technology is not keeping up with the demand of the webscales.

Presentation including AWS custom router hardware from re:Invent 2016 https://youtu.be/AyOAjFNPAbA?t=23m15s

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