How Protective ReRoute improves network resilience

Cloud infrastructure reliability is foundational, yet even the most sophisticated global networks can suffer from a critical issue: slow or failed recovery from routing outages. In massive, planetary-scale networks like Google's, router failures or complex, hidden conditions can prevent traditional routing protocols from restoring service quickly, or sometimes at all. These brief but costly outages — what we call slow convergence or convergence failure — critically disrupt real-time applications with low tolerance to packet loss and, most acutely, today's massive, sensitive AI/ML training jobs, where a brief network hiccup can waste millions of dollars in compute time. 

To solve this problem, we pioneered Protective ReRoute (PRR), a radical shift that moves the responsibility for rapid failure recovery from the centralized network core to the distributed endpoints themselves. Since putting it into production over five years ago, this host-based mechanism has dramatically increased Google’s network's resilience, proving effective ...