FLAX: A Flexible Architecture for Large Scale Cloud Fabric

摘要

The scalability and geographical location agility of data centers have become two key concerns for those critical cloud applications. However, it is still infeasible to build non-blocking data centers which are scalable, agile and cost-effective, given that current network devices are either closed high-end or performance limited, and the dedicated fiber is expensive and hard to expand. This paper proposes FLAX, a flexible architecture consolidating intra-and inter-cloud networks for large scale fabric. By leveraging on Software-Defined Networking techniques, FLAX can provide non-blocking application networks and scale out to millions of 10 gigabit ethernet ports across geographically-separated and arbitrarily-connected cloud data centers. Under the global view of network controllers, uniformed design of switches in different hierarchies and involving Wide Area Networks make it possible to fully use all network elements, and hence driving down the cost of network infrastructure. We present the architecture design and future work in this paper, and also a prototype deployed in one of the largest third-party data centers in eastern China.