Building a Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure

Prepare for the future of cloud infrastructure: Distributed Services Platforms

By moving service modules closer to applications, Distributed Services (DS) Platforms will future-proof cloud architectures–improving performance, responsiveness, observability, and troubleshooting. Network pioneer Silvano Gai demonstrates DS Platforms’ remarkable capabilities and guides you through implementing them in diverse hardware.

Focusing on business benefits throughout, Gai shows how to provide essential shared services such as segment routing, NAT, firewall, micro-segmentation, load balancing, SSL/TLS termination, VPNs, RDMA, and storage–including storage compression and encryption. He also compares three leading hardware-based approaches–Sea of Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs–preparing you to evaluate solutions, ask the right questions, and plan strategies for your environment.

• Understand the business drivers behind DS Platforms, and the value they offer
• See how modern network design and virtualization create a foundation for DS Platforms
• Achieve unprecedented scale through domain-specific hardware, standardized functionalities, and granular distribution
• Compare advantages and disadvantages of each leading hardware approach to DS Platforms
• Learn how P4 Domain-Specific Language and architecture enable high-performance, low-power ASICs that are data-plane-programmable at runtime
• Distribute cloud security services, including firewalls, encryption, key management, and VPNs
• Implement distributed storage and RDMA services in large-scale cloud networks
• Utilize Distributed Services Cards to offload networking processing from host CPUs
• Explore the newest DS Platform management architectures

Building a Future-Proof Cloud Architecture is for network, cloud, application, and storage engineers, security experts, and every technology professional who wants to succeed with tomorrow’s most advanced service architectures.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction to Distributed Platforms

Chapter 2: Network Design

Chapter 3: Virtualization

Chapter 4: Network Virtualization Services

Chapter 5: Security Services

Chapter 6: Distributed Storage and RDMA Services

Chapter 7: CPUs and Domain-Specific Hardware

Chapter 8: NIC Evolution

Chapter 9: Implementing a DS Platform

Chapter 10: DSN Hardware Architectures

Chapter 11: The P4 Domain-Specific Language

Chapter 12: Management Architectures for DS Platforms

About the Author

Silvano Gai, who grew up in a small village near Asti, Italy, has more than 35 years of experience in computer engineering and computer networks. He is the author of several books and technical publications on computer networking as well as multiple Internet Drafts and RFCs. He is responsible for 50 issued patents. His background includes seven years as a full professor of Computer Engineering, tenure track, at Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and seven years as a researcher at the CNR (Italian National Council for Scientific Research). For the past 20 years, he has been in Silicon Valley where, in the position of Cisco Fellow, he was an architect of the Cisco Catalyst family of network switches, of the Cisco MDS family of storage networking switches, of the Nexus family of data center switches, and the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Silvano is currently a Fellow with Pensando Systems.