Uber has a lot in common with the cities it serves. Both are always changing and growing, both must carefully manage the resulting traffic to prevent congestion and sprawl. Uber has continuously evolved its technical strategies to manage its expanding network, and this careful planning and constant evolution helps ensure that application traffic across its entire platform runs smoothly. Ultimately, maintaining a reliable, high-scale platform that operates seamlessly at any given time is key to preserving user trust. One important solution in this effort has been application awareness on Cloud Interconnect .
An industry-first tool for application prioritization across hybrid networks, application awareness on Cloud Interconnect has helped Uber prioritize critical traffic to ensure business continuity during potential network congestion events. Uber acted as an early design partner for application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, helping ensure that this capability met the demands of Uber’s global-scale operations.
It not only improved Uber’s daily operations, it also gave Uber the confidence to move forward with a Google Cloud migration, with confidence that there would be less risk of service interruptions during switchovers. In this post, we’ll explain the features Uber most sought and why, the inner workings of application awareness on Cloud Interconnect, and how it can help other organizations as well. When migrating distributed, hybrid, or multicloud applications at a global scale, network reliability becomes a primary concern.
Even the most worthwhile migrations may not seem worth it if such migrations interrupt ongoing service. For organizations like Uber, moving vast amounts of data to support large data analytics workload — including emerging AI use cases — can saturate network links, resulting in increased reliability risk for their critical application traffic. With standard cloud interconnect approaches, enterprises typically apply simple bandwidth overprovisioning to meet extreme infrastructure needs.