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GGN: Experiences in Designing and Deploying the Next-Generation Google Global Network

Aug 2026 · Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2026 Conference · 0 citations · 28 references

TL;DR

Google's Global Network (GGN), a major architectural redesign of the WAN that evolves B2 and B4 into a single, modular, and highly available software-defined network, is presented.

Abstract

Cloud and AI/ML workloads are posing unprecedented new requirements on the wide-area network: it must combine strict availability, massive growth, and feature agility. It became increasingly clear that traditional WAN designs were ill-equipped to adapt to these requirements. We present Google's Global Network (GGN), a major architectural redesign of our WAN that evolves B2 and B4 into a single, modular, and highly available software-defined network. The architecture is designed around three pillars: (1) A modular design of functional domains with well-defined APIs; (2) a physically sharded and regionalized core for fault isolation and horizontal scaling; (3) a vendor-agnostic hardware strategy based on open standards. We share the multi-year deployment journey of GGN, including a safe, host-steered migration strategy, and demonstrate its ability to improve network availability and reaction time to failures, setting a foundation for a planet-scale modern WAN.

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