Staying competitive in the cutthroat cloud market requires more than just an aggressive feature release schedule. The top providers also continuously enhance their infrastructure to improve operational efficiency, an area where Google Inc. now hopes to gain an edge.

The search giant today revealed an upgrade to its cloud platform that should enable companies to access and distribute their data noticeably faster. Google credits the speed-up to BBR, an internally developed algorithm that has previously been implemented in its search homepage and YouTube. Throughput for the video sharing service increased by an average of 4 percent globally after the rollout, with some countries seeing a more than 14 percent gain.  

BBR is a congestion control algorithm designed to prevent sudden traffic bursts from hindering communications. Such software has been included in routers, switches and other network-connected devices since the 1980s, when the immaturity of information technology made it relatively straightforward to determine when the flow of data should be throttled.

For the most part, engineers relied on packet loss as their main indicator. When the limited amount of memory in a router or switch filled up, that usually meant there was too much data coming over the network. The issue is that technology has evolved a great deal since that time while most congestion control algorithms still assess traffic in the same way. 

Enter BBR. According to Google, the algorithm can paint a more accurate picture of network usage than its predecessors by evaluating metrics that directly correspond to congestion. There are two in particular: the maximum amount of bandwidth available to a connection and the minimum delay experienced during the most recent round-trip.

The implementation of BBR in Google’s platform applies this to several key services. First, traffic to object storage volumes and database instances is now managed by the algorithm, which means that applications running on top can fetch information faster. Websites that rely on the Google Cloud Load Balancing and Google Cloud CDN will likewise benefit from BBR in the form of faster loading times for visitors.

Google has shared the specifications for the technology with The Internet Engineering Task Force. The move indicates that the search intends BBR to be adopted by other organizations as well, which isn’t too big a surprise given its past work on web communications standards.

Image: Google