Facebook has built its own switch. And it looks a lot like a server
Not content to remake the server, Facebook's engineers have taken on the humble switch, building their own version of the networking box and the software to go with it. The resulting switch, dubbed Wedge …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's hardware ambitions keep climbing the stack. After designing all its own servers starting in 2013, its engineers have now built Wedge, a homegrown network switch with custom software to run it — applying the same treat-hardware-as-a-software-problem discipline that produced the open-sourced Hack language on the code side.
The pickup was unusually broad for an infrastructure story: Gigaom's report ran alongside coverage from the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Wired, eWeek, Network Computing, EnterpriseTech, Business Insider, and Facebook's own Code blog within a day, signaling that the networking industry — long the last bastion of branded, vertically integrated gear — saw this as more than a lab curiosity.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own data centers get a switch it controls end-to-end — hardware plus software — reducing dependence on incumbent networking vendors' proprietary boxes and firmware roadmaps.
- Wedge's design looks deliberately server-like, meaning Facebook's existing server supply chain and operations tooling can extend to networking rather than maintaining a separate vendor relationship.
Second-order effects
- Network equipment makers face the same dynamic that hit server OEMs after Facebook's 2013 server move: a marquee hyperscaler demonstrating that commodity designs plus open software can match branded gear at scale.
- Merchant silicon and ODM manufacturers gain a new demand channel if Facebook open-sources or shares Wedge through its Open Compute Project channel, as it did with its server designs.
Third-order effects
- If hyperscalers keep pulling switching into the same build-it-yourself model as servers, networking disaggregates: switches commoditize around merchant silicon while value migrates to the software layer, eroding the premium pricing of vertically integrated networking vendors.
- Open hardware communities like the Open Compute Project would expand beyond compute into the fabric itself, letting mid-size cloud operators adopt hyperscaler network designs without hyperscaler engineering staff.
The trend: Hyperscale operators are dismantling the vertically integrated networking stack one layer at a time — first servers, now switches — moving value from branded hardware toward open designs and software.