Learning to Flow (Between Datacenters) (opens in new tab)

Due to its fundamental importance and wide-ranging applications, flow optimization is one the most well-studied topics in computer science. A key example of its practical significance is traffic engineering (TE). Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Netflix invest enormous resources into high-capacity private “backbone networks” that interconnect providers’ datacenters to one another, and to external networks.3,9–11,18 Figure 1 illustrates Microsoft’s backbone network, which...