Orchestrating Multi-Tenant Code Updates Across Multiple Programmable Switches

In recent years, programmable devices delivering accelerated hardware-assisted network functions became more prevalent, esp. in data center and service provider networks. While these devices allow for greater flexibility, they are also more expensive and therefore pay off for providers when used by several tenants. However, code updates rolled out by a tenant negatively affect other customers’ on the same hardware due to short interruptions during the update. To overcome these deficiencies, we extended our previously published orchestrator for multi-tenant code updates to be aware of multiple devices and surrounding network context. The new implementation allows seamless and gradual multi-tenant code updates, e.g., in service provider or data center networks including tests to minimize negative cross-tenant interference caused by the code updates.