US 9,871,731 B2Granted

Data plane manipulation in a load balancer

AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC

InventorsDeepak Bansal, Geoffrey Hugh Outhred, Narasimhan Agrahara Venkataramaiah, Shekhar Agarwal

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Abstract

A load balancer capable of adjusting how network data is distributed to a tenant or group of tenants by manipulating the data plane. The load balancer is placed directly in the flow path of network data that is destined for a tenant or group of tenants having a tenant address. The load balancer includes a control plane and one or more data planes. Each data plane may contain one or more network traffic multiplexors. Further, each data plane may be dedicated to a tenant or group of tenants. Data planes may be added or deleted from the load balancer; additionally, multiplexors may be added or deleted from a data plane. Accordingly, network data directed towards one tenant is less likely to affect the performance of load balancing performed for another tenant.

Claims20

Dependent claims

A system, the system comprising:

one or more tenants, each tenant or group of tenants having a tenant address;
a source configured to receive one or more network data destined for one or more tenant addresses assigned to a tenant or group of tenants;
and
a load balancer configured to receive the one or more network data from the source and to distribute the one or more network data to the tenant address assigned to the tenant or group of tenants, the load balancer being in the data flow path of the one or more network data, the load balancer comprising:
a control plane, the control plane being configured to perform one or more of the following acts:
an act of instantiating one or more data planes;
an act of deleting one or more data planes;
and
an act of determining when changes are to be made to one or more data planes within a plurality of data planes;
and
the plurality of data planes, the plurality of data planes including a first data plane and a second data plane, the first and second data planes each having a plurality of multiplexers (MUXes), wherein one or both of the first or second data planes performs two or more of the following acts when the control plane determines that a change is to be made:
an act of instantiating one or more MUXes within at least one of the first or second data planes;
an act of destroying one or more MUXes from within at least one of the first or second data planes;
an act of dedicating the first data plane to a first tenant or group of tenants;
and
an act of dedicating the second data plane to a second tenant or group of tenants, wherein the first and second data plane provide network data isolation from each other.

13 more elements

A method for a load balancer to modify a distribution of network data, the load balancer comprising one or more data planes each having one or more multiplexers (MUXes), at least one of the one or more data plane corresponding to a tenant or group of tenants, the corresponding data plane being placed in a data path of network data being transmitted from one or more sources to one or more tenant addresses of the corresponding tenant or group of tenants, the method comprising:

an act of adding one or more data planes to the load balancer, each of the one or more data planes having one or more MUXes;
and act of removing one or more data planes from the load balancer, each of the one or more data planes having one or more MUXes;
an act of dedicating the added one or more data planes to a tenant or group of tenants;
and
an act of routing a network data destined for the tenant or group of tenants through the newly added one or more data planes.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Facts

Application: 14/871,645Filed 30 Sep 2015
Published: US 2017/0093724 A130 Mar 2017
Granted: 16 Jan 2018
Term ends: Not estimatedThe source records don’t support an estimate.

Classification5 codes

H04L 67/1001
In which an application is distributed across nodes in the network: for accessing one among a plurality of replicated servers
H04L 47/125
Avoiding congestion; Recovering from congestion: by balancing the load, e.g. traffic engineering
H04L 67/1008
Server selection for load balancing: based on parameters of servers, e.g. available memory or workload
H04L 67/1023
Server selection for load balancing: based on a hash applied to IP addresses or costs