Policy-based routing and load balancing for EVPN-based data center interconnections

摘要

The Ethernet VPN (EVPN) technology has emerged as a key solution for the interconnection of geo-distributed Data Centers (DCs) over provider-managed MPLS networks. Such interconnections need to satisfy service-level agreements, which can be achieved by enforcing Traffic Engineering (TE) policies. However, deploying an effective TE policy is challenging and complex. This stems from the fact that network administrators should have a detailed insight into the network status and protocol specifics. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) may facilitate both the policy definition and deployment based on its comprehensive network view and existing integration with DC management systems, such as OpenStack. This paper presents an SDN-based framework for policy-driven DC interconnections that are built around EVPN. The framework is designed to translate routing and other TE policies, which are defined for EVPN instances, into appropriate low-level network actions to meet the policy goals. A generic programming interface allows an SDN controller to load different TE strategies so as to implement the policy, without the need to hard-code it. Moreover, our evaluations illustrate how clients might benefit from specific TE strategies and what is their impact on network performance.