udploadbalancer

An UDP load-balancer prototype using bcc (XDP/Bpf)

usage: sbulb [-h] -vs VIRTUAL_SERVER
             (-rs REAL_SERVER [REAL_SERVER ...] | -cfg CONFIG_FILE) -p PORT
             [PORT ...] [-d {0,1,2,3,4}]
             [-l {CRITICAL,ERROR,WARNING,INFO,DEBUG,TRACE}] [-mp MAX_PORTS]
             [-mrs MAX_REALSERVERS] [-ma MAX_ASSOCIATIONS]
             ifnet

positional arguments:
  ifnet                 network interface to load balance (e.g. eth0)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -vs VIRTUAL_SERVER, --virtual_server VIRTUAL_SERVER
                        <Required> Virtual server address (e.g. 10.40.0.1)
  -rs REAL_SERVER [REAL_SERVER ...], --real_server REAL_SERVER [REAL_SERVER ...]
                        <Required> Real server address(es) (e.g. 10.40.0.2 10.40.0.3)
  -cfg CONFIG_FILE, --config_file CONFIG_FILE
                        <Required> a path to a file containing real server address(es). 
                        File will be polled each second for modification and configuration
                        updated dynamically. A file content example :
                        
                        [Real Servers]
                        10.0.0.4
                        10.0.0.2
                        10.0.0.6
                        
  -p PORT [PORT ...], --port PORT [PORT ...]
                        <Required> UDP port(s) to load balance
  -d {0,1,2,3,4}, --debug {0,1,2,3,4}
                        Use to set bpf verbosity, 0 is minimal. (default: 0)
  -l {CRITICAL,ERROR,WARNING,INFO,DEBUG,TRACE}, --loglevel {CRITICAL,ERROR,WARNING,INFO,DEBUG,TRACE}
                        Use to set logging verbosity. (default: ERROR)
  -mp MAX_PORTS, --max_ports MAX_PORTS
                        Set the maximum number of port to load balance. (default: 16)
  -mrs MAX_REALSERVERS, --max_realservers MAX_REALSERVERS
                        Set the maximum number of real servers. (default: 32)
  -ma MAX_ASSOCIATIONS, --max_associations MAX_ASSOCIATIONS
                        Set the maximum number of associations. (default: 1048576)
                        This defined the maximum number of foreign peers supported at the same time.

Eg : sudo python3 -m sbulb eth0 -vs 10.188.7.99 -rs 10.188.100.163 10.188.100.230 -p 5683 5684

Behavior

This load balancer can be considered as a Layer-4 NAT load-balancer as it only modifies IP address.

For ingress traffic :

we search if we have a clientip:port/realserverip association.
if yes, we modify destination address (dest NAT) replacing virtual IP address by the real server IP one.
if no, we pick a real server and create a new association, and do dest NAT as above.

For egress traffic :

we search if we have an clientip:port/realserverip association.
if yes and packet comes from the associated real server , we modify source address (source NAT) replacing real server address by the virtual server ip address.
if yes and packet comes from "not associated" real server, we drop the packet
if no, we create a new association using the source IP address(real server IP address) and modifying source address(source NAT) by the virtual server ip address.

We keep this association is a large LRU map as long as possible, meaning the oldest association is only removed if LRU map is full and new association must be created.

The algorithm used is a simple round-robin.

⚠️ All packets from the realservers to the client must go through the udp load-balancer machine/director (like with LVS-NAT).

Why create a new load balancer ?

In a cluster, generally the good practice is to share states between each server instances, but sometime some states can not be shared...
E.g. a cluster of servers which can not share DTLS connection, in this case you want to always send packet from a given client to the same server to limit the number of handshakes.
To do that you need to create a long-lived association between the client and the server, but most of the UDP loadbalancer are thougth to have ephemere association. Most of the time this association lifetime can be configured and you can set a large value, but here thanks to the LRU map we can keep the association as long as we can.

The other point is server initiated communication. We want to be able to initiate communication from a server exactly as if communication was initiated by a client. Meaning same association table is used.

Limitation

This is a simple load-balancer and so it have some limitations :

All traffic (ingress and egress) should be handled by the same network interface.
All traffic should go to the same ethernet gateway (which is the case most of the time).
Does not support IP fragmentation.
Does not support IP packet with header options for now. Meaning IP header size (number of 32 bits word) must be set to 5.

Requirements & dependencies

You need :

a recent linux kernel to be able to launch xdp/bpf code. (currently tested with 4.19.x package)
bcc installed. (currently tested with v0.8 : package python3-bpfcc on debian)
linux-headers installed to allow bcc to compile bpf code.

Usage with systemd

Sbulb supports the sd_notify(3) mechanism, but does not require systemd or any systemd library to run. This allows sbulb to notify systemd when it is ready to accept connections. To use this feature, you can write a service like this:

[Unit]
Description=UDP Load Balancer
Wants=network-online.target
[Service]
Type=notify
NotifyAccess=all
Environment=PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -m slulb args...
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Performance

See our wiki page about that.

Unit Tests

To launch unit tests :

sudo python3 -m unittest                                   # all tests
sudo python3 -m unittest sbulb.tests.IPv4TestCase          # only 1 test case
sudo python3 -m unittest sbulb.tests.IPv4TestCase.test_lru # only 1 test

Tests needs bcc v0.14 (python3-bpfcc) and scapy (python3-scapy).

XDP/Bpf

Why XDP/Bpf ? Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF?.

Read about XDP/Bpf : Dive into BPF: a list of reading material.

Inspirations :

Documentations :

Thesis :

High-performance Load Balancer in IOVisor

AirVantage/sbulb