ADON: Application-driven Overlay Network-as-a-Service for data-intensive science

Campuses are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud architectures for supporting data-intensive science applications that require “on-demand” resources, which are not always available locally on-site. Policies at the campus edge for handling multiple such applications competing for remote resources can cause bottlenecks across applications. These bottlenecks can be proactively avoided with pertinent profiling, monitoring and control of application flows using software-defined networking principles. In this paper, we present an “Application-driven Overlay Network-as-a-Service” (ADON) that can manage the hybrid cloud requirements of multiple applications in a scalable and extensible manner using features such as: programmable “custom templates” and a “virtual tenant handler”. Our solution approach involves scheduling transit selection and traffic engineering at the campus-edge based on real-time policy control that ensures predictable application performance delivery for multi-tenant traffic profiles. We validate our ADON approach with an implementation on a wide-area overlay network testbed across two campuses, and present a workflow that eases the orchestration of network programmability for campus network providers and data-intensive application users. Lastly, we present an emulation study of the ADON effectiveness in handling temporal behavior of multi-tenant traffic burst arrivals using profiles from a diverse set of actual data-intensive applications.