Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) network technology trends
In the era of data explosion, the scale of business supported by cloud computing has grown exponentially, making the integration of software and hardware a necessity; cloud computing data center networks are also booming, evolving from 1G, 10G, and 25G to 100G and 200G in just ten years, and are still developing rapidly;
The massive growth in demand for multi-region intranet interconnection, on-premises data center and cloud network interconnection, and hybrid cloud construction is driving continuous innovation in cloud networks, namely, cloud networks are evolving from simple VPC isolation to elastic IP, load balancing, firewalls, routing computing, and more.
In 5G IoT scenarios, edge computing is developing rapidly, and edge computing gateways have become a necessity.
Cloud computing and IoT trends and demands
The rapid development of cloud computing networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) presents significant challenges to cloud and IoT gateways:
The cloud network Gateway experienced a dramatic increase in public network/dedicated line/cross-Region VPC traffic, with sudden surges in traffic.
Traditional gateways suffer from insufficient performance, bloated functionality hindering rapid iteration, and inadequate interconnection hashing and routing convergence capabilities. DPDK-based x86 clusters also face single-core performance issues, making them unable to handle high traffic and attack traffic. Furthermore, scaling speed and uneven cluster load frequently occur, becoming one of the bottlenecks for business development.
As cloud networks require increasingly specialized features, traditional MIPS multi-core gateways and DPDK clusters under the x86 architecture have weak support capabilities and poor hot-start capabilities.
Edge node server rooms have limited space and energy consumption, making it difficult to support multiple gateways, switching and routing servers, etc.
The rapid development of cloud computing infrastructure and services is driving the current trend of cloud and IoT gateways towards hardware-software integration, placing more specific demands on the functionality and performance of cloud networks and IoT gateways.
Highly virtualized, providing hybrid cloud and cross-regional networks to meet the needs of massive branches and mobile devices for seamless cloud services;
With the increasing demand for cloud-native technologies, such as public network gateways, leased line gateways, NAT gateways, L4/L7 LB, host AVS, and Private-Link, there is a growing need for highly elastic scaling capabilities.
Automation capabilities are provided through a service-based approach to cloud network services, enabling cloud network service orchestration and automated configuration.
The demand for high performance is increasing, including public network bandwidth, hardware-based basic gateways, smart network cards, cloud network underlying network resources, and high-performance, low-latency networks.
Microsoft Research Asia launched the ServerSwitch project around 2009, connecting commercial switch chips and servers through a high-bandwidth PCI-E interface. This fully leveraged the programmability of the switch chips and CPUs to create a high-performance, programmable forwarding engine for data center architectures. The paper published based on this project won the Best Paper Award at the 2011 USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), a top conference in computer systems and networks. This was the prototype of ServerSwitch.
The emergence of Barefoot Tofino, the industry's first Internet programmable switch chip based on Protocol Independent Switch Architecture, provides fertile ground for the development of ServerSwitch with its high-performance, high-reliability, and high-flexibility forwarding combination through customer-customizable forwarding logic and dynamically allocated table entry resources.
Application scenarios of cloud networks and IoT gateways and H3C's efforts
Initially, cloud networks and IoT gateways were built using physical servers and DPDK-based software. Especially with the decline of Moore's Law, the demand for bandwidth has increased dramatically, negatively impacting installation, deployment, delivery, maintenance, cost (Capex and Opex), and power consumption. Therefore, integrated hardware and software solutions have become essential. These solutions utilize high-performance CPUs, hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes of memory, massive storage, and high-performance processing cards such as multiple FPGAs or GPUs, as well as high-performance switching chips. Integrated hardware and software gateways for cloud computing and IoT are primarily used in the following scenarios:
For high-performance and secure access scenarios in cloud networks and IoT, it provides high-performance network forwarding, offering channels for users' data centers or offices to access public/private clouds. It provides encrypted, low-latency, jitter-free access tunnels, firewall/NAT, and load balancing capabilities, and provides GPU and FPGA computing capabilities for special computing services.
In cloud-based cross-regional communication or edge data center dedicated line scenarios, such as providing shared terabit-level high bandwidth and high-quality channels between availability zones in the North China Region and the South China Region, and between data centers and edge computing nodes;
In the intelligent scheduling scenario of data center outbound traffic, it provides elastic IP capabilities, optimizes the forwarding logic pipeline and table entry format to provide network QoS and table lookup capabilities at the level of millions or even tens of millions for cross-region services, intelligently orchestrates and schedules special services, and provides terabyte-level logs containing various network flow information;
Distributed forwarding within cloud data centers provides bare metal machine and public cloud VXLAN encapsulation and decapsulation capabilities, and offers tenant isolation, consistent hashing, ARP proxy and other functions, supporting data sharding and version canary release capabilities.
Currently, H3C is collaborating with several internet customers on the development of Serverswith cloud network edge gateways. Leveraging industry-open-source ONL systems or Sonic network operating system software, and based on Barefoot Tofino/Tofino2 chips and high-performance multi-core x86 CPUs, it provides ultra-high bandwidth forwarding capabilities and high-performance general-purpose computing power. It also incorporates multi-GPU/FPGA chips and large-capacity storage media to provide multi-dimensional data computing capabilities and data forwarding status storage capabilities, creating a new generation of high-speed programmable gateways with large TB-level bandwidth.
