eskratch

This blog post is an account of how we have toiled over the years to improve the throughput of our interDC tunnels. I joined this company around 2012. We were scaling aggressively then. We quickly expanded to 4 DCs with a mixture of AWS and colocation. Our primary DC is connected to all these new DCs via IPSEC tunnels established from SRX. The SRX model we had, had an IPSEC throughput of 350Mbps. Around December 2015 we saturated the SRX. Buying SRX was an option on the table. Buying one with 2Gbps throughput would have cut the story short. The tech team didn't see it happening. I don't have an answer to the question, "Is it worth spending time in solving a problem if a solution is already available out of box?" This project helped us in improving our critical thinking and in experiencing the theoretical network fundamentals on live traffic, but also caused us quite a bit of fatigue due to management overhead. Cutting short the philosophy, lets jump to the story. ...

We were moving a project from AWS to our co-located DC. We have setup KVMs scheduled by Cloudstack for each of the component in the architecture. The KVMs used local storage. The VMs are provisioned with more than required resources because we have the opinion that in our DC scaling during peak load and then downscaling doesn't offer much benefits financially as we are anyways paying for the hardware in advance and its also powered on. Its going to be idle if not used. Now we found something interesting our latency in co-located DC was 2 times more than in AWS. The time for first byte at our load balancer in aws was 60ms average and at our DC was 112ms. We started our debugging mission, Mission Conquer-AWS. All the servers are newer Dell hardwares. So the initially intuition was virtualisation is causing the issue. Conversation with the Hypervisor We started with CPU optimisation, we started using the host-passthrough mode of CPU in libvirt so VMs dont see QEMU emulated CPUs,...