Robust Service Function Chains in OpenStack

International audienceCloud Computing and virtualization are largely adopted in the IT world and starts to gain momentum in networking to implement network functions such as switches or routers but also complex network service chains such as end to end security services. Surprisingly, while robustness is the first question that comes when deploying dedicated network infrastructures, cloud infrastructures provide little or no robustness guarantees for virtualized network functions.As a matter of facts, traditional Cloud infrastructure are several order of magnitude slower than dedicated network infrastructures to react to faults. In this work, we aim at providing robustness guarantees for network functions deployed with OpenStack, the leading open source project for cloud computing.Multiple options are possible to implement such robustness in OpenStack but we designed an approach that minimizes the changes required in OpenStack in order such that it can be smoothly integrated with the official releases. Our well documented implementation follows the best programming practices to guarantee its correctness and integration in a large open source project. Our tests in a real Open-Stack environment composed of multiple compute nodes validate our choices and prove its usability