Online Robust Placement of Service Chains for Large Data Center Topologies

Abstract

The trend today is to deploy applications and more generally service function chains (SFCs) in public clouds. However, before being deployed in the cloud, chains were deployed on dedicated infrastructures, where software, hardware, and network components were managed by the same entity, making it straightforward to provide robustness guarantees. By moving their services to the cloud, the users lose their control on the infrastructure and hence on the robustness. In this paper, we provide an online algorithm for robust placement of service chains in data centers. Our placement algorithm determines the required number of replicas for each function of the chain and its placement in the data center. Our simulations on large data-center topologies with up to 30 528 nodes show that our algorithm is fast enough such that one can consider robust chain placements in real time even in a very large data center and without the need of prior knowledge on the demand distribution.