With billions of people all over the world using its services, Facebook has long been forced to develop its own networking infrastructure in order to cope with the load because the systems and technologies to do so simply don’t exist elsewhere. Not only that, but the company has a long history of sharing those developments, open-sourcing many of its technology components so others can use and improve them for the benefit of everyone else.

In line with this approach, Facebook today is open-sourcing its newly created “forwarding plane software library,” which is a component that powers the network load balancer used in its infrastructure. Load balancers are used to distribute network and application traffic across multiple servers, in order to increase their capacity and reliability.

Facebook’s latest tool is called Katran, which is a software-based load balancing tool it said has made its backend networking infrastructure far more reliable and scalable. The company previously relied on a hardware-based system to perform load balancing on its networks, but this older system wasn’t flexible enough to handle its increasing load and the latest services it offers.

Katran is said to take advantage of two recent innovations in kernel engineering, namely eXpress Data Path and the eBPF virtual machine, and has helped to make its backend servers more flexible, while also making network balancing more efficient. The company has provided an in-depth explanation of how Katran works in its blog post on the subject.

“We believe that Katran offers an excellent forwarding plane to users and organizations who intend to leverage the exciting combination of XDP and eBPF to build efficient load balancers,” Facebook engineers Nikita Shirokov and Ranjeeth Dasineni wrote.

In addition to Katran, Facebook has also posted details of its new Zero Touch Provisioning tool, which is a network provisioning system used by its engineers to automate the nonphysical work required to build backbone networks. The tool was built in response to the limited availability of its network engineers to carry out manual checks and tests of its network infrastructure. Zero Touch serves to automate much of this work, allowing its engineers to spend more of their time on tasks that cannot be automated.

“Our previous network provisioning systems proved inadequate for the scale and complexity of building these networks, so we created our own comprehensive, flexible workflow system with Zero Touch Provisioning,” Facebook’s engineering team wrote in a second blog post. “This new framework has already empowered Facebook’s engineers to move faster, to solve problems more creatively, and to take a far more iterative approach to building their networks and their network deployment tools.”

Image: Facebook