SideCar: building programmable datacenter networks without programmable switches

Abstract

This paper examines an extreme point in the design space of programmable switches and network policy enforcement. Rather than relying on extensive changes to switches to provide more programmability, SideCar distributes custom processing code between shims running on every end host and general purpose sidecar processors, such as server blades, connected to each switch via commonly available redirection mechanisms. This provides applications with pervasive network instrumentation and programmability on the forwarding plane. While not a perfect replacement for programmable switches, this solves several pressing problems while requiring little or no change to existing switches. In particular, in the context of public cloud data centers with 1000s of tenants, we present novel solutions for multicast, controllable network bandwidth allocation (e.g., use-what-you-pay-for), and reachability isolation (e.g., a tenant's VM only sees other VMs of the tenant and shared services).