Google is making networking technology that powers its internal services available to Google compute engine customers.

Codenamed Andromeda, Google’s network virtualization stack, now powers two Google Compute Engine zones: us-central1-b and europe-west1-a. Customers in these zones will automatically see major performance gains in throughput, says Google. The company will be fully migrating all zones to Andromeda in the coming months.

Amin Vahdat (Distinguished Engineer, Google): At Google, we benefit from having programmable access to the entire network stack, from the lowest-level hardware to the highest-level software elements. Rather than being forced to create compromised solutions based on available insertion points, we can design end-to-end secure and performant solutions by coordinating across the stack.

Andromeda is a Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based substrate for Google’s network virtualization efforts, letting users provision, configure, and manage virtual networks and in-network packet processing. 

Andromeda functionalities include distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, transparent service load balancing, access control lists, and firewalls.  

[Image courtesy: Google]