PlanetLab: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in Planetary-Scale Infrastructure

PlanetLab is a global platform for evaluating and deploying network services. It currently includes over 600 nodes, spanning nearly 300 sites and 30 countries, and hosts over 400 experimental services. PlanetLab must satisfy a unique set of sometimes contradictory requirements: based on our experiences building PlanetLab over the past three years, we are now able to define an architecture that satisfies these requirements. This talk identifies the requirements, presents the design principles that follow from them, and outlines the resulting PlanetLab architecture. It also briefly discusses some of the lessons we learned about building large network systems.