Analyzing the Performance of SD-WAN Enabled Service Function Chains Across the Globe with AWS

Abstract

Cloud Computing has revolutionized the information technology world and the application offering over the last two decades. At the same time recent trends in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) and the combination of those with the Cloud paradigm has allowed an unprecedented shift of enterprise networking services towards the Public Cloud. Even though this network evolutionary approach brings many benefits, it still presents many drawbacks as well. The performance stability and service continuity over a black box Public Cloud infrastructure can hinder the formal service guarantees that many new emerging applications may have. To this end, in this paper, we aim to shed light on the overall performance achieved when deploying coast-to-coast and intercontinental Service Function Chains (SFCs) that interconnect geographically distributed enterprise branches over the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. In particular, we investigate the impact of region, Virtual Machine (VM) instance, time of the day and day of the week in the overall throughput and delay attained. The obtained results show the strengths and weaknesses of entirely relying on the AWS infrastructure to offer networking services by investigating possible hidden performance bottlenecks.