Google Inc. on Tuesday unveiled Espresso, the latest piece of its never-ending quest to speed up its services all the way to the edge of its massive global network.

Google has been steadily building out its networking infrastructure for more than 10 years in an effort to support new real-time services. Espresso, the latest piece of its so-called software-defined networking foundation that emulates networking gear in software to allow for greater speed and scale, is just the latest part in that expansion. It expands Google’s SDN efforts to what it calls the “peering edge” of the network – that is, where different networks connect to one another.

Espresso functions as the “edge-facing” component of Google’s extensive network, connecting its machines with Internet service providers and other provider’s interconnect facilities. It’s already been in production, behind the scenes, for two years, and routes around 20 percent of Google’s traffic to the web, Google Fellow Amin Vahdat and Distinguished Engineer Bikash Koley explained in a blog post they co-authored.

“Espresso extends our approach all the way to the peering edge of our network, the point where Google connects to other networks across the planet,” they said. “Google has one of the largest peering surfaces in the world, exchanging information with Internet Service. However, we found that existing Internet protocols could not manage our traffic to deliver the best availability and user experience to our users across the planet.”

Espresso is just the latest in a long line of networking tools its built to connect its search engine, web and cloud services to the Internet. And just like its previous efforts, which include the Andromeda Network Function Virtualization stack and Jupiter datacenter interconnect, Espresso will soon be adapted and offered as a commercial product on Google’s cloud.

According to Vahdat and Koley, Espresso provides two key advantages. First, instead of connecting users to a static point that’s based on their IP address, Espresso allows Google to dynamically select where users should be served. The benefit of this is that Google can balance traffic based on performance data, allowing it to react to congestion or failures. Secondly, Espresso allows Google to separate traffic management control and logic from the confines of individual routers.

By offering Espresso as a service, Google reckons its cloud will offer improved performance and uptime by forging faster and more consistent links between its customers and their virtual machines.

“This means we can often react to Internet routing failures faster than Internet routing protocols – which translates into higher availability of network services hosted on Google Cloud,” the team explained. “Unique to Google Cloud, this means that our customers’ traffic can be routed around outages, whereas our competitors’ will not.”

More broadly, Espresso represents another step in the industry’s move to turn more hardware functions into software so they can scale up and be used more flexibly. “The computer is going to break out of the confines of the individual server,” Vahdat said as he unveiled Espresso at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California.

With reporting from Robert Hof

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