Stratos

Network-aware Orchestration Layer for Middleboxes in Clouds

News

Stratos Patent Issued

August 11, 2015

US patent #9,104,492 has been issued for Stratos.

Stratos in SDNCentral blog post

April 18, 2013

Stratos was featured in an SDNCentral blog post as one of the five most interesting presentations in the Research Track at ONS 2013.

Stratos presented at ONS 2013

April 16, 2013

Stratos was presented in the Research Track at the Open Networking Summit 2013.

Overview

Middleboxes (e.g., load balancers and WAN optimizers) are an important part of many application deployments. However, cloud providers and third party frameworks only offer a limited set of add-on middlebox services. Providers have not created the necessary mechanisms for cloud tenants to flexibly and efficiently deploy middleboxes from vendors of their choosing.

Stratos addresses this gap by treating middleboxes as first-class entities. It provides abstractions for tenants to specify their middlebox needs, and it automatically deploys and scales middleboxes in a way that maximizes performance, minimizes cost, and efficiently uses a provider's network. Stratos can be deployed by providers of public or private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, providers or vendors interested in offering middleboxes-as-a-service, or network providers interested in network functions virtualization.

Key Features & Benefits of Stratos

  • Decreases deployment complexity by providing logical abstractions for specifying desired middlebox traversals
  • Ensures suitable middlebox performance at minimal cost by performing automated, network-aware scaling
  • Makes efficient use of a provider's data center by performing network-aware placement and flow distribution
  • Works with virtual middleboxes from third party vendors, and requires no knowledge of/changes to middleboxes
  • Driven completely by software, making it easily deployable on existing infrastructure