Content delivery networks and edge peering facilities have unique operating constraints which require novel approaches to load balancing. Contrary to traditional, centralized datacenter networks, physical space is heavily constrained. This limitation drives both the need for greater efficiency, maximizing the ability to absorb denial of service attacks and flash crowds at the edge, and seamless failover, minimizing the impact of maintenance on service availability. This talk presents Faild, a distributed load balancer which runs on commodity hardware and achieves graceful failover without relying on network state, providing a cost-effective and scalable alternative to existing proposals. Faild allows any individual component of the edge network to be removed from service without breaking existing connections, a property which has proved instrumental in sustaining the growth of a large global edge network over the past four years. As a consequence of this operational experience, this talk further discusses unexpected protocol interactions stemming from misconfigured devices in the wild which have significant ramifications for transport protocol design.

Lorenzo Saino is an engineering manager at Fastly, leading the team responsible for designing and building its network stack. He received a Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering from University College London in 2015. For his doctoral research, he received the Fabrizio Lombardi prize for the best recently graduated PhD in 2016. From 2008 to 2011 he was a research engineer at Orange Labs where he carried out research in various subjects, including network mobility, mobile networks service design, smart cards, mobile cloud computing and information security. He was the recipient of the Orange Labs best patent award in 2011. He received a B.S. in Telecommunications Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2007 and a M.S. from University College London in 2008.