AWS Cracks Decades-Old Data Center Puzzle With ‘Random’ Network Design
It promises faster data movement, improved resilience, lower power consumption, and billions of dollars in infrastructure savings.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled a major breakthrough in data centre networking, becoming the first company to deploy a flat network architecture at scale using principles inspired by random graph theory — a concept long considered impractical for real-world infrastructure.
The development, detailed in AWS’s technical report RNG: Flat Datacentre Networks at Scale, promises faster data movement, improved resilience, lower power consumption, and billions of dollars in infrastructure savings.
"RNG gives traffic many more possible paths across the network, reducing bottlenecks and improving fault tolerance. In testing, it delivered up to 33% better throughput than traditional hierarchical designs while using significantly fewer networking devices and less power," Matt Garman, AWS CEO, said.
The project began in 2023 after Ratul Mahajan, an Amazon Scholar and University of Washington professor, posted a message on an internal Slack channel seeking expertise in graph theory and routing.
Seshadhri Comandur, a mathematician and Amazon Scholar from the University of California, Santa Cruz, responded despite having little prior experience with data centres.
Together with AWS principal applied scientist Giacomo Bernardi, the team tackled a longstanding challenge in networking: replacing traditional tree-like router hierarchies with a flat architecture where routers connect more dynamically.
Traditional networks can create bottlenecks because data must pass through predefined layers. AWS instead used random graph theory to create a system where data can travel through multiple possible paths simultaneously, reducing congestion and eliminating single points of failure.
To make the concept deployable, AWS engineers created “ShuffleBox,” a hardware enclosure that standardizes randomized fiber-optic connectivity at scale.
The company also developed a new routing protocol called “Spraypoint,” which distributes traffic across hundreds of paths instead of relying only on the shortest route.
“Shortest paths aren't always the best option,” said Comandur. “Sometimes you need to take a slightly longer route, but then you have many different options available, which dramatically reduces the risk of congestion.”
AWS said testing showed the new design moved data up to one-third faster than traditional architectures while reducing electricity consumption for network equipment by 40%.
The company has already begun rolling out the architecture in Spain and Germany and plans broader deployment across global data centres in 2026.
