Murad Kablan, Blake Caldwell, Richard Han, Hani Jamjoom and Eric Keller
ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization
(HotMiddlebox). Also appeared as a poster in USENIX NSDI.
London, UK, August 2015
Abstract. Newly virtualized network functions (like firewalls,
routers, and intrusion detection systems) should be
easy to consume. Despite recent efforts to improve
their elasticity and high availability, network
functions continue to maintain important flow state,
requiring traditional development and deployment
life cycles. At the same time, many cloud-scale
applications are being rearchitected to be stateless
by cleanly pushing application state into dedicated
caches or backend stores. This state separation is
enabling these applications to be more agile and
support the so-called continuous deployment model.
In this paper, we propose that network functions
should be similarly redesigned to be stateless.
Drawing insights from different classes of network
functions, we describe how stateless network
functions can leverage recent advances in
low-latency network systems to achieve acceptable
performance. Our Click-based prototype integrates
with RAMCloud; using NAT as an example network
function, we demonstrate that we are able to create
stateless network functions that maintain the
desired performance.
Keywords. Network Function Virtualization, Middlebox
Bibtex.
@inproceedings{jamjoom-stateless-hotmiddlebox-2015,
author = {Murad and Kablan and Blake and Caldwell and Richard and Han and Hani and Jamjoom and Eric and Keller},
title = {{Stateless Network Functions}},
booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization
(HotMiddlebox). Also appeared as a poster in USENIX NSDI.},
address = {London, UK},
month = {August},
year = {2015}
}