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Ananta: cloud scale load balancing

Authors:

Albert Greenberg,

David A. Maltz,

Naveen KarriAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

Pages 207 - 218

https://doi.org/10.1145/2486001.2486026

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Layer-4 load balancing is fundamental to creating scale-out web services. We designed and implemented Ananta, a scale-out layer-4 load balancer that runs on commodity hardware and meets the performance, reliability and operational requirements of multi-tenant cloud computing environments. Ananta combines existing techniques in routing and distributed systems in a unique way and splits the components of a load balancer into a consensus-based reliable control plane and a decentralized scale-out data plane. A key component of Ananta is an agent in every host that can take over the packet modification function from the load balancer, thereby enabling the load balancer to naturally scale with the size of the data center. Due to its distributed architecture, Ananta provides direct server return (DSR) and network address translation (NAT) capabilities across layer-2 boundaries. Multiple instances of Ananta have been deployed in the Windows Azure public cloud with combined bandwidth capacity exceeding 1Tbps. It is serving traffic needs of a diverse set of tenants, including the blob, table and relational storage services. With its scale-out data plane we can easily achieve more than 100Gbps throughput for a single public IP address. In this paper, we describe the requirements of a cloud-scale load balancer, the design of Ananta and lessons learnt from its implementation and operation in the Windows Azure public cloud.

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335898
Nakamura REbisawa KHayashi HFujiwara TOkuzawa T(2024)Exploiting SRv6 for Stateless and Per-Connection-Consistent Load BalancingIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341301612(83525-83537)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3413016
Kanwal ANizamuddin MIqbal WAman WAbbas YMussiraliyeva S(2024)Exploring Security Dynamics in SDN Controller Architectures: Threat Landscape and ImplicationsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.339096812(56517-56553)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3390968
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Index Terms

Ananta: cloud scale load balancing
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM

August 2013

580 pages

ISBN:9781450320566

DOI:10.1145/2486001

General Chairs:
Dah Ming Chiu
Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
,
Jia Wang
AT&T Labs - Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Paul Barford
University of Wisconsin, USA
,
Srinivasan Seshan
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 43, Issue 4
October 2013
595 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/2534169
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2013

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SIGCOMM'13

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SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference

August 12 - 16, 2013

Hong Kong, China

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SIGCOMM '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 246 submissions, 15%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Cited By

Nance-Hall MBarford PFoerster KDurairajan R(2024)Improving Scalability in Traffic Engineering via Optical Topology ProgrammingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.333589821:2(1581-1600)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3335898
Nakamura REbisawa KHayashi HFujiwara TOkuzawa T(2024)Exploiting SRv6 for Stateless and Per-Connection-Consistent Load BalancingIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341301612(83525-83537)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3413016
Kanwal ANizamuddin MIqbal WAman WAbbas YMussiraliyeva S(2024)Exploring Security Dynamics in SDN Controller Architectures: Threat Landscape and ImplicationsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.339096812(56517-56553)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3390968
Choi IWadekar NJoshi RFried JPorts DZhang ILi J(2023)CapybaraProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems10.1145/3609510.3609813(30-36)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609510.3609813
Yang RKogias M(2023)HEELS: A Host-Enabled eBPF-Based Load Balancing SchemeProceedings of the 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3609021.3609307(77-83)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609021.3609307
Bothra RGandhi RBhagwan RPadmanabhan VLiang RCarlson SKamath VAcharyya SSueda KChaturmohta SSharma HSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Switchboard: Efficient Resource Management for Conferencing ServicesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604879(1000-1011)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604879
Lupu CAlbișoru ANichita RBlânzeanu DPogonaru MDeaconescu RRaiciu CFedorova ANarayanan DDi Luna GQuerzoni L(2023)Nephele: Extending Virtualization Environments for Cloning Unikernel-based VMsProceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3552326.3587454(574-589)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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Ma JXie SZhao J(2023)Flexible Offloading of Service Function Chains to Programmable SwitchesIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2022.316270116:2(1198-1211)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2022.3162701
Sadeh YRottenstreich OKaplan H(2023)Load Balancing With Minimal Deviation in Switch MemoriesIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.328574920:4(4283-4296)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3285749
Cohen RLo MSayah Q(2023)On The Protection of A High Performance Load Balancer Against SYN AttacksIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2023.3234122(1-14)Online publication date: 2023
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