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I've heard the terms East-West and North-South mentioned in respect to network traffic or network design. What does it refer to and in what scenarios is it relevant?

gb5757870
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    Is it an InfoSec-related term? – schroeder Aug 18 '15 at 02:52
  • It's a system description metaphor. Typically the user is on the west, and their activities flow eastwards further and further into the system. Management, maintenance functions typically sit northwards and reach downwards and (in my experience) data functions sit to the south. But I'm not sure if there's consensus on this, or if it's more idiosyncratic in practice. There may be an infosec dimension in terms of separation of concerns and partitioning of roles. – robert Aug 18 '15 at 08:59

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A quote from the third google result for "what is east-west traffic networking":

In the context of both the LAN and the WAN, north-south traffic is the client server traffic that goes between users in a branch office and the data center that hosts the application that they are accessing. In the context of the data center LAN, east-west traffic is the traffic that goes between servers in a given data center. Relative to the discussion of WAN optimization that we will have in the next two newsletters, east-west traffic is the traffic that goes between servers in different data centers.

KnightOfNi
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  • Thanks, I did indeed first Google it first, but as it turns out didn't phrase the query the correct way to get that result. – gb5757870 Aug 18 '15 at 04:23