vCRIB: Virtualized Rule Management in the Cloud

Cloud operators increasingly need many fine-grained rules to better control individual network flows for various management tasks. While previous approaches have advocated placing rules either on hypervisors or switches, we argue that future data centers would benefit from leveraging rule processing capabilities at both for better scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose vCRIB, a virtualized Cloud Rule Information Base that allows operators to freely define different management policies without the need to consider underlying resource constraints. The challenge in our approach is the design of a vCRIB manager that automatically partitions and places rules at both hypervisors and switches to achieve a good trade-off between resource usage and performance.