Quadrant: A Cloud-Deployable NF Virtualization Platform

Abstract

Network Functions (NFs) now process a significant fraction of Internet traffic. Software-based NF Virtualization (NFV) promised to enable rapid development of new NFs by vendors and leverage the power and economics of commodity computing infrastructure for NF deployment. To date, no cloud NFV systems achieve NF chaining, isolation, SLO-adherence, and scaling together with existing cloud computing infrastructure and abstractions, all while achieving generality, speed, and ease of deployment. These properties are taken for granted in other cloud contexts but unavailable for NF processing. We present Quadrant, an efficient and secure cloud-deployable NFV system, and show that Quadrant's approach of adapting existing cloud infrastructure to support packet processing can achieve NF chaining, isolation, generality, and performance in NFV. Quadrant reuses common cloud infrastructure such as Kubernetes, serverless, the Linux kernel, NIC hardware, and switches. It enables easy NFV deployment while delivering up to double the performance per core compared to the state of the art.