Use Cases and Problem Statement for Routing on Service Addresses
draft-mendes-rtgwg-rosa-use-cases-01

Abstract

The proliferation of virtualization, microservices, and serverless architectures has made the deployment of services possible in more than one network location, alongside long practised replication within single network locations, such as within a CDN datacentre. This necessitates the potential need to coordinate the steering of (client-initiated) traffic towards different services and their deployed instances across the network. The term 'service-based routing' (SBR) captures the set of mechanisms for said traffic steering, positioned as an anycast problem, in that it requires the selection of one of the possibly many choices for service execution at the very start of a service transaction, followed by the transfer of packets to that chosen service endpoint. This document provides typical scenarios for service-based routing, particularly for which a more dynamic and efficient (in terms of both latency and signalling overhead) selection of suitable service execution endpoints would not exhibit the overheads and thus latency penalties experienced with existing explicit discovery methods. Related drafts introduce the design for an in-band service discovery method instead, named Routing on Service Addresses (ROSA), based on the insights from the use case and problem discussion in this draft.

Authors

Paulo Mendes
Jens Finkhäuser
Luis M. Contreras
Dirk Trossen

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)