Google Open Sources Seesaw for Network Load Balancing

Google has open-sourced another internal software project. This one, called Seesaw, is a load-balancing platform that is based on Linux. It’s now available under an Apache 2.0 license.

To be sure, load balancing does not top most people’s lists of the most romantic or interesting IT solutions. But it’s an essential component of modern networking. Load-balancing software helps servers exchange information efficiently and make optimal use of the data pipelines available to them — while also preventing network overloads or other potential problems.

Seesaw, as Google explained, was developed internally to meet the company’s load-balancing needs, after engineers determined that no good existing solution was available. It’s written using Google’s Go programming language.

Google says Seesaw was designed to provide easy management and the ability to automate configuration changes. That makes it ideal for large enterprises that need a flexible load-balancing solution.

Plenty of load-balancing platforms are already available on the market, but many of them are linked to particular hardware. By providing an enterprise-grade, vendor-neutral package for load-balancing, Google has open-sourced another networking and datacenter solution that could see widespread use throughout the enterprise world.