Network hose: Managing uncertain network demand with model simplicity

What this post added

Introduced the 'network hose' model for production backbone network capacity planning. This model shifts from forecasting pairwise traffic matrices between data centers to forecasting aggregate ingress and egress traffic per data center. This simplification reduces planning complexity by an order of magnitude and allows services to reason about network resources more like other consumable entities. The approach leverages identifying critical network cuts (especially simple, geographically relevant ones) to derive a minimal set of reference demand matrices that, when planned for, guarantee coverage for all possible traffic matrices satisfying the hose constraint. This method simplifies operational workflows and reduces false alarms related to traffic surges.