Stratosphere: Dynamic IP Overlay Above the Clouds

Multi-cloud promises to substantially improve fault-tolerance, by tolerating disasters affecting a subset of providers. Unfortunately, multi-cloud solutions are premature and none of them are fully fledged. Their main impediment is the lack of network services: to date, it remains impossible for a customer to setup and control a multi-cloud network. Moreover, manually inter-connecting multiple clouds from various providers is challenging: each cloud provider may offer dissimilar services and incompatible APIs. In this paper, we present the first reconfigurable intercloud network, called Stratosphere. Stratosphere combines recent achievements in the context of container deployment and software defined networking (SDN) to build an SDN-based IP overlay of software containers across providers. Stratosphere aims at dynamically re-routing traffic based on service guarantees, congestion, or failures. We evaluate Stratosphere by reconfiguring the network between major cloud providers, namely Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The comparison against the Docker Swarm baseline indicates that this unique reconfiguration feature presents an overhead of only 1% when not used but can improve bandwidth significantly when used.