LuoShen: A Hyper-Converged Programmable Gateway for Multi-Tenant Multi-Service Edge Clouds

Edge clouds are expected to be a key revenue growth driver for cloud vendors in the next decade; however, simply replicating the network infrastructure for the public cloud to the edge experiences deployment issues. At the edge, the challenge for cloud network design is to deliver the required performance under the stringent restrictions of hardware budget and deployment footprints, while retaining functionality equivalence. To this end, we propose LuoShen, a hyper-converged gateway for multi-tenant multi-service edge clouds by consolidating the entire cloud network infrastructure into a 2U server switch with a P4-centric architecture. At the data plane, LuoShen conducts pipeline folding and fits the original overlay and underlay devices into the switch pipeline via meticulous on-chip resource budgeting. At the control plane, LuoShen relies on BGP peering to ensure inter-component reachability. LuoShen achieves 1.2Tbps throughput and reduces the upfront cost, deployment size and power usage by 75%, 87%, 60%, compared with the original cloud network architecture. It has been deployed in Alibaba Cloud at hundreds of edge sites.