leaf and spine

Tags: networks

First described by Brad Hedlund for Hadoop in 2012, but Google did this earlier with specialized hardware. Can now be done with off the shelf hardware from Arista or Juniper

• Leaves are “top of rack” switches, spines are densely connected to leaves to get oversubscription of free networks,
• bgp allows automatic routing table builds, and uses equal cost multipath (ECMP) to spread traffic evenly