Multi-Cloud Chaining with Segment Routing

In recent years, next to Cloud Computing, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has emerged as one of the most interesting paradigms inside the ICT world, leading to unexplored scenarios and new features such as Service Chaining. The latter consisting in steering the packets through a sequence of services on their way to the destination. Even more, these services can be located inside different Public Clouds, hence giving us the possibility to exploit for the first time a Multi-Cloud approach. One way to perform Service Chaining is through the new Segment Routing protocol for IPv6. Within this context we have investigated how we could create, inside Amazon Web Services, a Multi-Cloud configuration to provide Service Chaining, leveraging on the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) software router for packet handling and SRv6 processing. We performed extensive measurement campaigns, looking in particular on how VPP and Segment Routing presence could affect the overall performance inside Amazon Web Services and having a first insight on what performance can be achieved when chaining several cloud instances in different geographical regions.