Distributed Gateway Service for VPC Edge Routing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Stateful edge services in networks often face bottlenecks due to limited state-maintaining devices, and distributed architectures suffer from misdirection issues where traffic is forwarded to incorrect instances, leading to inefficiencies in processing.
Innovation Solution
A novel network architecture that includes route servers for advertising network addresses within an availability zone, using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) or other route advertising protocols, to manage distributed services at the edge of a virtual private cloud, ensuring accurate routing and service instance management.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If a limited number of state-maintaining devices are used to provide stateful services, then device complexity is reduced, but bottlenecks occur in traffic processing
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the stateful service function into multiple distributed service instances deployed across multiple host computers. Each instance maintains state information independently, allowing traffic to be distributed across multiple devices rather than concentrated on a single gateway, thereby eliminating bottlenecks while keeping individual device complexity manageable.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a new dimension to service deployment by distributing stateful services across multiple hosts in a virtualized environment. This multi-dimensional distribution approach allows traffic to be processed in parallel across different physical or virtual machines, increasing overall throughput without requiring each individual device to handle all traffic.
2Productivity
If a distributed stateful service architecture is used to solve bottlenecks, then traffic processing capacity increases, but misdirection issues occur where traffic is forwarded to incorrect instances
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism where the routing instance on each host learns about available services and their network addresses through route advertisement protocols (e.g., BGP). This feedback loop ensures that routing decisions are based on current, accurate information about service locations, preventing misdirection of traffic to incorrect instances.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces routing instances as intermediary components that mediate between incoming traffic and distributed service instances. These routing instances maintain routing tables and make intelligent forwarding decisions based on learned route information, ensuring that traffic is directed to the correct service instance while allowing the services themselves to remain distributed across multiple hosts.
3Measurement precision
If route advertisement protocols are used to manage distributed services, then service instance management accuracy improves, but network communication overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by having routing instances proactively advertise their available services and network addresses to other routing instances using route advertisement protocols. This advance notification allows the network to build accurate routing tables before traffic needs to be forwarded, ensuring precise service instance identification without requiring continuous communication overhead during normal operation.
Data Source
AI summary
Some embodiments of the invention provide a novel network architecture for providing edge services of a virtual private cloud (VPC) at host computers hosting machines of the VPC. The host computers in the novel network architecture are reachable from external networks through a gateway router of an availability zone (AZ). The gateway router receives a data message from the external network addressed to one or more data compute nodes (DCNs) in the VPC and forwards the data message to a particular host computer identified as providing a distributed edge service for the VPC. The particular host computer, upon receiving the forwarded data message, performs the distributed edge service and provides the serviced data message to a destination DCN.