Alibaba Cloud has revealed the hardware design it uses to run networks at its edge sites, and those devices' reliance on Intel Tofino ASICs.

The Chinese cloud giant unveiled its technology in April at the 21st USENIX Symposium on Design and Implementation of Network Systems, and in a paper [PDF] titled "LuoShen: A Hyper-Converged Programmable Gateway for Multi-Tenant Multi-Service Edge Clouds " with accompanying images [PDF].

Alibaba Cloud's material describes LuoShen as a "server switch" and revealed that the devices have already been in production use for two years at "hundreds of edge sites." The boxes are 2U – an important achievement, as the Chinese cloud edge locations have a 42U rack and the organization wants it filled with servers it can rent, not network kit.

LuoShen boxes contain a processor, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and Tofino—an Intel Ethernet ASIC that Chipzilla suggests is ideal for improving network performance because it's programmable.