On the ‘net: LinkedIn’s DC Design Principles

Operating a large-scale, rapidly growing network requires a philosophical change in how you plan, deploy, and operate your infrastructure. At LinkedIn, as we scaled our data center network, it became evident that we needed to provision and build networks not only as quickly as possible, but also with the most simple and minimalistic approaches possible — something that previously was not quite apparent to us. Adding a new component, a new feature, or a new service without any traffic loss or architectural change is challenging. —Network Computing