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Uber has a lot in common with the cities it serves. Both are always changing and growing, both must carefully manage the resulting traffic to prevent congestion and sprawl.
Uber has continuously evolved its technical strategies to manage its expanding network, and this careful planning and constant evolution helps ensure that application traffic across its entire platform runs smoothly. Ultimately, maintaining a reliable, high-scale platform that operates seamlessly at any given time is key to preserving user trust.
One important solution in this effort has been application awareness on Cloud Interconnect. An industry-first tool for application prioritization across hybrid networks, application awareness on Cloud Interconnect has helped Uber prioritize critical traffic to ensure business continuity during potential network congestion events.
Uber acted as an early design partner for application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, helping ensure that this capability met the demands of Uber’s global-scale operations. It not only improved Uber’s daily operations, it also gave Uber the confidence to move forward with a Google Cloud migration, with confidence that there would be less risk of service interruptions during switchovers.
In this post, we’ll explain the features Uber most sought and why, the inner workings of application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, and how it can help other organizations as well.
When migrating distributed, hybrid, or multicloud applications at a global scale, network reliability becomes a primary concern. Even the most worthwhile migrations may not seem worth it if such migrations interrupt ongoing service. For organizations like Uber, moving vast amounts of data to support large data analytics workload — including emerging AI use cases — can saturate network links, resulting in increased reliability risk for their critical application traffic.
With standard cloud interconnect approaches, enterprises typically apply simple bandwidth overprovisioning to meet extreme infrastructure needs. But with today’s hybrid cloud demands, and given the size of an organization like Uber, overprovisioning network capacity for peak usage is often too costly and unreliable.
The shortcomings of overprovisioning only become magnified with the integration of cutting-edge AI innovations. Uber needs systems in place that can take on massive data transfers without congesting its network and protecting the performance of business-critical applications.
With the benefit of application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, including the four major features of application awareness — traffic handling, congestion response, latency management, and cost efficiency — Uber was able to achieve the networking optimization its modern tech stack requires.
Starting with a private preview, Uber deployed this feature across its infrastructure, beginning with Google Cloud Interconnect deployments in Phoenix, Arizona, and Ashburn, Virginia. Application awareness on Cloud Interconnect allows Uber to classify and prioritize end-user application traffic over less time-sensitive data using DSCP marking and configured queuing profiles.
In the following chart, we look at the four key features of application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, how they differ from legacy approaches, and how they help provide better operational continuity for organizations like Uber.
|
Feature |
Standard interconnect solutions |
Application awareness on Cloud Interconnect |
|---|---|---|
|
Traffic handling |
All traffic treated equally (first-in, first-out) |
Traffic classified into six distinct traffic classes |
|
Congestion response |
High-priority application traffic may be dropped during bursts |
Business-critical traffic is protected via strict priority or bandwidth sharing policies |
|
Latency management |
Unpredictable latency for high priority applications |
Predictable and consistent low-latency for time-sensitive workloads |
|
Cost efficiency |
Requires expensive overprovisioning to absorb peaks |
Efficient bandwidth utilization and lower TCO |
For Uber, the business value of being able to prioritize business-critical traffic on its networks by deploying application awareness on Cloud Interconnect was immediate. And in doing so, Uber has also created a blueprint that other enterprises with similar hybrid cloud challenges can replicate. The core elements of that blueprint include:
Ensuring business continuity: Uber can decide in real time which application traffic to prioritize during major, high-traffic events. This means that mission critical applications stay up and running during even extreme events (both planned and unplanned). Uber leadership has called application awareness on Cloud Interconnect important for its global operations.
Efficient bandwidth utilization: Instead of blindly overprovisioning bandwidth to prevent congestion, application awareness allows Uber to better utilize their existing Cloud Interconnect capacity aligned with their expected network bandwidth needs. The result is lower total cost of ownership for network infrastructure.
Unblocked workload migration: By protecting critical applications from network congestion, Uber was able to migrate significant workloads to Google Cloud and, in the process, dramatically reduce operational overhead.
“Application awareness on Cloud Interconnect was the key that unlocked our ability to migrate more strategic workloads to Google Cloud and is critical for maintaining service reliability during peak global demand. By allowing us to intelligently prioritize traffic, it helps us ensure that we can protect our higher priority services and make our infrastructure more efficient, lowering our total cost of ownership. This wasn’t just a feature deployment; it was a deep engineering partnership that delivered a solution critical to our business.” – Harry Liu, Director of Engineering, Uber
As more enterprises integrate cloud-based AI models, distributed applications, and data analytics, it’s becoming a business imperative to be ready to handle the massive data transfers that follow. But in doing so, they also have to ensure they never compromise the reliability of their critical applications.
With application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, Uber demonstrated that moving beyond simple bandwidth overprovisioning to protect business-critical traffic was an essential step to building the stability required to embrace modern hybrid and multicloud strategies.
You can read our blog about the potential of Cloud Interconnect across industries to learn more about what the service can bring to your organization, and if you’re ready to explore more, our team of networking and industry experts are ready to help.
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