Backbone

A backbone built for Pacific and Atlantic hops

xserv-b-hub

Long-haul circuits between São Paulo, Santiago, Bogotá and Miami are treated as one fabric, not a pile of unrelated circuits.

Backbone: Why it matters on this continent

Design for Backbone on letter B starts in São Paulo (GRU). Runbook b-01 keeps a single owner, a written rollback, and a traffic split that can be reversed without a global freeze. Neighbors in Santiago only take overflow after the local pool fails a health window.

Backbone: How XServ runs it day to day

Probes for Backbone (b-02) leave Santiago every 15s toward Bogotá. XServ pages the named owner if loss or RTT crosses the letter budget. A probe never shares a queue with bulk transfers, so a saturated WAN does not hide a dead PoP.

Backbone: What operators should measure

Policy for Backbone is versioned as b-03. Operators measure error rate, p95 from Bogotá, and time-to-rollback — not a worldwide average. Changes land in Bogotá first, then Miami, with a hold if either region regresses.

Backbone: Failure modes we actually see

Capacity notes for b-04 assume rainy-season power in Miami and festival peaks toward São Paulo. The failure we actually see is a single uplink, not a cartoon partition of the whole continent. Spare ports and a second provider sit on the same runbook.

Backbone: How this letter ties to the rest

Handoff from letter B Backbone into the rest of the platform uses the same request IDs as the gateway. Runbook b-05 names who accepts the ticket after São Paulo pages out. Santiago does not silently inherit the incident.

Backbone: A note on cost and transit

Rollback for b-06 is a documented command, not a hope. Transit is billed as backup while Backbone prefers peering in Santiago. If cost spikes, the runbook cuts overflow to Bogotá before touching customer prefixes.

Backbone design B-01

Design for Backbone on letter B starts in São Paulo (GRU). Runbook b-01 keeps a single owner, a written rollback, and a traffic split that can be reversed without a global freeze. Neighbors in Santiago only take overflow after the local pool fails a health window.

Backbone probe B-02

Probes for Backbone (b-02) leave Santiago every 15s toward Bogotá. XServ pages the named owner if loss or RTT crosses the letter budget. A probe never shares a queue with bulk transfers, so a saturated WAN does not hide a dead PoP.

Backbone policy B-03

Policy for Backbone is versioned as b-03. Operators measure error rate, p95 from Bogotá, and time-to-rollback — not a worldwide average. Changes land in Bogotá first, then Miami, with a hold if either region regresses.

Backbone capacity B-04

Capacity notes for b-04 assume rainy-season power in Miami and festival peaks toward São Paulo. The failure we actually see is a single uplink, not a cartoon partition of the whole continent. Spare ports and a second provider sit on the same runbook.

Backbone handoff B-05

Handoff from letter B Backbone into the rest of the platform uses the same request IDs as the gateway. Runbook b-05 names who accepts the ticket after São Paulo pages out. Santiago does not silently inherit the incident.

Backbone rollback B-06

Rollback for b-06 is a documented command, not a hope. Transit is billed as backup while Backbone prefers peering in Santiago. If cost spikes, the runbook cuts overflow to Bogotá before touching customer prefixes.

Backbone peering B-07

Peering for Backbone (b-07) prefers the IX fabric that already carries last-mile ISPs in Bogotá. Session counts and prefix limits are on the same page as the Miami backup path.

Backbone cache B-08

Cache rules for Backbone on b-08 keep language-correct objects near Miami. São Paulo is a sibling cache, not an origin. TTLs are short enough that a bad asset does not live through a weekend.

Backbone headers B-09

Headers for b-09 carry the letter, the region (GRU) and a request id. Backbone debugging in São Paulo should not require a packet capture in Santiago first.

Backbone timeouts B-10

Timeouts on b-10 are tighter than the WAN RTT to Bogotá. Backbone in Santiago fails fast and retries once; a third try needs a human because it is no longer a blip.

Backbone regions B-11

Region names on b-11 match DNS and tickets: Bogotá / BOG, with Miami as the documented pair. Backbone dashboards never say “LATAM” as if it were one RTT.

Backbone docs B-12

Public docs for letter B stay aligned with identifier xserv-b-pack. Page b-12 is the Backbone slice operators search before the homepage. Edits in Miami show up in São Paulo on the next publish.

Does Backbone on letter B share fate with other letters?
The control plane is shared. Data-plane queues for Backbone stay isolated, so incident b-01 cannot drain neighbor letters.
Where is Backbone measured first?
From Santiago (SCL) toward Bogotá. A global average is not an SLO for letter B.
How fast is rollback for b-03?
The runbook is a command plus a named owner. There is no wait for a weekly change freeze.
Is transit the default path?
No. Peering in Miami is default; transit to São Paulo is overflow and is billed that way.

Pages in this letter