STATEFUL SERVICES ON STATELESS CLUSTERED EDGE

• US 20160142297A1
• Filed: 11/14/2014
• Published: 05/19/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 11/14/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nicira Incorporated (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Nicira Incorporated (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: Parsa, Mike, Jain, Jayant, Hong, Xinhua, Sengupta, Anirban, Fan, Kai-Wei
• Granted Patent: US 9,876,714 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/38 Flow based routing
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/46 Cluster building
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/58 Association of routers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/7453 using hashing
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 61/2503 Translation of Internet protocol [IP] addresses

Abstract

In order to enable dynamic scaling of network services at the edge, novel systems and methods are provided to enable addition of add new nodes or removal of existing nodes while retaining the affinity of the flows through the stateful services. The methods provide a cluster of network nodes that can be dynamically resized to handle and process network traffic that utilizes stateful network services. The existing traffic flows through the edge continue to function during and after the changes to membership of the cluster. All nodes in the cluster operate in active-active mode, i.e., they are receiving and processing traffic flows, thereby maximizing the utilization of the available processing power.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

identifying a particular node for performing stateful service on packets of a particular flow, the packets of the particular flow each comprising a set of source fields and a set of destination fields, wherein the particular node is identified from a cluster of nodes based on a hash of the set of source fields but not the set of destination fields; and

performing the stateful service at the identified particular node for the particular flow.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of source fields comprises source IP address and source port.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the set of destination fields comprises destination IP address.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the stateful service translates an original destination address in the set of destination fields into a translated destination address.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the identified particular node maintains state information for the particular flow.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein performing the stateful service comprises forwarding packets belonging to the particular flow to the particular node.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the cluster of nodes is an edge service cluster providing stateful services.

8. A method comprising:

for each outgoing packet of a network segment, identifying a node in a cluster of nodes by hashing flow identifiers in the outgoing packet, the identified node for providing stateful edge service for a flow identified by the flow identifiers of the outgoing packet; and

for each incoming packet of the network segment, identifying a node in the cluster of nodes based on a translated source address in the incoming packet that is uniquely associated with the identified node.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein each node of the cluster provides the stateful edge service to the outgoing packets by replacing an original source address of the flow with a translated source address that is uniquely associated with the node.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein the stateful edge service provided to the outgoing packets is source network address translation (SNAT).

11. The method of claim 10, wherein each node in the cluster performs SNAT by translating a source address in outgoing packets into a unique SNAT address.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein the stateful edge service provided by the node identified by the source address in the incoming packet is inverse SNAT that replaces the translated source address with an original source address of the flow.

13. The method of claim 8, wherein the node identified by the translated source address in the incoming packet maintains state information for the flow of the incoming packet.

14. A non-transitory computer readable medium storing a program executable on at least one processing unit, the program comprising sets of instructions for:

identifying a particular node for performing stateful service on packets of a particular flow, the packets of the particular flow comprising a set of source fields and a set of destination fields, wherein the particular node is identified from a cluster of nodes based on a hash of the set of source fields but not the set of destination fields; and

performing the stateful service at the identified particular node for the particular flow.

15. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein the set of source fields comprises source IP address and source port.

16. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein the set of destination fields comprises destination IP address.

17. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein the stateful service translates an original destination address in the set of destination fields into a translated destination address.

18. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein identified particular node maintains state information for the particular flow.

19. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein the set of instructions for performing the stateful service comprises a set of instructions for forwarding packets belonging to the particular flow to the particular node.

20. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 14, wherein the cluster of nodes is an edge service cluster providing stateful services.