Achieving Network Efficiency Through Service Collaborative Capacity Sharing and Enforcement
Meta's rapid expansion in users, business operations, and AI workloads is straining our backbone network, while physical constraints—such as fiber, space, and power—limit the speed of capacity growth. To address these challenges, we present a service-aware network capacity planning suite that systematically improves network efficiency with a service collaboration approach. We propose the "safe capacity" abstraction which enables services to incorporate current and projected network conditions into their compute and storage allocation decisions. We introduce a hose-carving method that efficiently translates service-level traffic demands into detailed traffic matrices, allowing for more precise bandwidth allocation. To promote responsible network usage, we design a network rate card which attributes network consumption to individual services, incentivizing optimization and resource trade-offs. Additionally, new enforcement features at the end-host layer dynamically adjust resource allocations and traffic flows at runtime to maximize utilization. This paper is the first to detail a collaborative, service-aware approach to backbone network efficiency at Meta scale. Based on years of operational experience, we share practical insights and highlight new directions for research in network efficiency.