Understanding Lifecycle Management Complexity Of Datacenter Topologies

Most recent datacenter topology designs have focused on performance properties such as latency and throughput. In this paper, we explore a new dimension, life cycle management complexity, which attempts to understand the complexity of deploying a topology and expanding it. By analyzing current practice in lifecycle management, we devise complexity metrics for lifecycle management, and show that existing topology classes have low lifecycle management complexity by some measures, but not by others. Motivated by this, we design a new class of topologies, FatClique, that, while being performance-equivalent to existing topologies, is comparable to, or better than them by all our lifecycle management complexity metrics.