Scalable and Robust East-West Forwarding Framework for Hyperscale Clouds

With the broad deployment of distributed applications on clouds, east-west traffic is now dominating the majority of cloud networks. The existing communication solutions are tightly coupled with either the control plane (e.g., preprogrammed model) or the location of compute nodes (e.g., conventional gateway model). As a result, it is difficult to flexibly respond to the rapidly expanding networks and frequent abnormal events (e.g., burst traffic and device failures). Accordingly, they may not provide high-performance east-west forwarding while ensuring scalability and robustness. To address this issue, we design Zeta, a scalable and robust east-west forwarding framework with gateway clusters for hyperscale clouds. Zeta abstracts the traffic forwarding capability as a Gateway Cluster Layer, decoupled from the logic of control plane and the location of compute nodes. Specifically, Zeta adopts gateway clusters to support large-scale networks and cope with burst traffic. Moreover, a transparent Multi IPs Migration is proposed for fast recovery from unpredictable failures. We implement Zeta based on eXpress Data Path (XDP) and evaluate its scalability and robustness through comprehensive experiments with up to 100k container instances. Our evaluation shows that Zeta reduces the 99% RTT by 5.1 × in burst video traffic, and reduces the gateway pure recovery delay by 10.8 × compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.