CyberStar: Simple, Elastic and Cost-Effective Network Functions Management in Cloud Network at Scale

Network functions (NFs) facilitate network operations and have become a critical service offered by cloud providers. One of the key challenges is how to meet the elastic requirements of massive traffic and diverse NF requests of tenants. This paper identifies the opportunity by leveraging cloud elastic compute services (ECS), i.e. containers or virtual machines, to provide the cloud-scale network function services, CyberStar. CyberStar introduces two key designs: (i) resource pooling based on a newly proposed three-tier architecture for scalable network functions; and (ii) on-demand resource assignment while maintaining high resource utilization in terms of both tenant demands and operation cost. Compared to the traditional NFs constructed over bare-metal servers, CyberStar can achieve 100Gbps bandwidth (6.7×) and scale to millions of connections within one second (20×).