Chinese web giant Alibaba has reduced network outages by 92 percent, cut load balancing costs by 18.9 percent, and found ways to improve SmartNIC performance by offloading workloads to idle infrastructure.

The company revealed those outcomes in papers it will present at the SIGCOMM conference next week.

The reduction in network outages came from a technology Alibaba calls “ZooRoute” that its researchers describe [PDF] as “a fast failure recovery service that ensures global bypass in large-scale cloud networks within seconds.”

The paper describing ZooRoute explains that cloud operators’ networks will inevitably fail from time to time, and that strategies like fast rerouting and traffic engineering can take seconds and minutes respectively to restore traffic flows – too slow for many user

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