Blender: Upgrading tenant-based data center networking

This paper presents Blender, a framework that enables network operators to improve tenant performance by tailoring the network's behavior to tenant needs. Tenants may upgrade their provisioned portion of the network with specific features, such as multi-path routing, isolation, and failure recovery, without modifying hosted application code. Network operators may differentiate themselves based on upgrades they offer, creating new upgrades via a lightweight programming interface. Blender safely executes multiple tenants' selections simultaneously across a shared network infrastructure. We show that the Blender model can express and extend recently proposed network functionality on existing SDN networks. We use an OpenFlow-based prototype to quantify Blender's performance and potential for deployment at scale.