VPC Packet Processing via Load Balancer Without Header Encapsulation
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing cloud systems in VPC scenarios face challenges in ensuring communication reliability and require complex overlay protocol configurations, leading to operational complexity and performance issues.
Innovation Solution
A cloud system based on a public cloud service with a VPC structure, including subnets and a router, utilizes a load balancer with elastic network interfaces and a packet processing cluster, employing bidirectional consistent hashing for node determination and MAC address modification to simplify packet processing without additional encapsulation, thereby improving reliability and performance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If complex overlay protocol configurations are used in VPC scenarios, then communication reliability can be improved, but device complexity and ease of operation deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complex overlay protocol configuration from the tenant's operational scope and relocates it to the cloud provider's managed infrastructure. The load balancer and packet processing cluster are deployed and configured by the cloud provider, eliminating the need for tenants to manually configure overlay protocols while maintaining communication reliability through provider-managed VPC networking.
Solution Approach 2:
The cloud provider acts as an intermediary between tenants, managing the VPC infrastructure, load balancer, and packet processing cluster. This intermediary handles the complex networking configurations and protocol implementations, allowing tenants to simply deploy instances without dealing with underlying network complexity while ensuring reliable communication.
2Reliability
If additional packet header encapsulation is performed, then communication reliability in VPC can be improved, but packet processing performance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent removes the packet header encapsulation operation from the packet processing flow by designing a direct routing architecture. The load balancer forwards packets to the packet processing cluster using VPC routing without requiring additional encapsulation, and the cluster processes packets directly without performance degradation, thus eliminating the trade-off between reliability and performance.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the mechanical encapsulation/decapsulation process with a software-based packet processing approach. The packet processing cluster uses software-defined networking techniques to handle packets efficiently without physical or protocol-based encapsulation overhead, maintaining both reliability and high processing performance.
3Adaptability or versatility
If node addition or deletion is performed in packet processing cluster, then system adaptability is improved, but device complexity increases due to frequent node adjustments
Solution Approach 1:
The cloud provider implements self-service capabilities for node addition and deletion in the packet processing cluster. When nodes are added or removed, the system automatically performs load redistribution and routing updates without requiring manual reconfiguration. Tenants can simply request node changes through API calls, and the cloud provider's automated systems handle the complexity of node adjustments transparently.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements preliminary actions by pre-configuring the packet processing cluster with multiple nodes and pre-establishing routing tables and load balancing policies. When node addition or deletion occurs, the system has pre-prepared templates and automated procedures to quickly integrate or remove nodes without complex reconfiguration, maintaining adaptability while minimizing operational complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A cloud system based on a public cloud service including a virtual private cloud (VPC) and a load balancer. The VPC includes a first subnet, a second subnet, and a third subnet. The load balancer includes a first elastic network interface ENI and a second ENI. In the cloud system provided in this solution, when sending a request packet to a second instance in the second subnet, a first instance in the first subnet forwards the packet to a packet processing service node in the third subnet via the first ENI and the second ENI. In this way, the packet is forwarded by the packet processing service node in the third subnet without additional packet header encapsulation, thereby simplifying a packet processing operation, and improving performance of the cloud system.