Netris SoftGate
Cloud Networking Functions Gateway
Add essential cloud networking functions to your cloud, such as Internet gateway, NAT gateway, Elastic Load Balancer, Network Access Control, and others.
Essential Cloud Networking Functions & Abstractions
Every private, public, or GPU-based AI/ML cloud requires effective methods to provide managed connectivity between the Internet (and other networks) and internal Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Typically, cloud providers offer this through cloud networking constructs like Internet gateways, NAT gateways, Elastic Load Balancers, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and others to manage these network functions on a per-VPC and per-user basis. But what’s really operating underneath these services? Surprisingly, it’s not traditional hardware routers or firewalls. Instead, the data plane for cloud networking functions is delivered via server-based solutions.
Netris SoftGate enables you to leverage standard Linux-based servers to provide horizontally scalable cloud networking functions. Combined with the Netris Switch Fabric Manager, you gain all the network abstractions required to build a private, public, or GPU cloud.
Cloud Networking Functions
Cloud builders need robust and flexible networking functions that can be easily consumed by both network engineering teams and end-users. Our solution is designed to provide these services in an elastic fashion across multiple VPCs (Virtual Private Clouds), even with overlapping IPv4/IPv6 addresses.
NAT – our Network Address Translation function provides Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, and Elastic IP functionalities through source NAT, destination NAT, port-mapping, and 1:1 NAT capabilities.
L4LB – Network Load Balancer service uses Maglev algorithm for consistent hashing, has TCP and HTTP health checks, and can service bare metal, VM, and Kubernetes/container endpoints.
ACL – Network Access Control Lists can permit or deny specific network traffic based on IPv4/IPv6, Subnet, TCP/UDP/ICMP protocol, and port.
DHCP – For VM or bare metal hosts configuration across VPCs and PXE-booting.
Routing – Can be used either for peering with the border router or directly with the upstream Internet provider or Internet Exchange Point (IXP).
Scalability, Flow Distribution, and High Availability
Netris SoftGate allows you to adjust your network capacity up or down as needed. It’s built to scale to millions of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), exceeding the typical VLAN and VRF limitation.
Horizontal Scalability – SoftGate runs on ordinary Linux-based bare metal servers and provides horizontal scalability. Based on monitoring of hardware resource utilization in the Netris controller, network engineers can gauge when to deploy more SoftGate servers to the cluster. Netris algorithms will redistribute the network flows equally across the nodes for seamless scaling.
VXLAN handoff – Unlike most network gateways, SoftGate nodes use BGP/EVPN for the underlay and become part of the switch fabric. This method allows using VXLAN isolation instead of VLAN to support millions of VPCs.
Maglev algorithm – if used for our L4LB service to ensure consistent hashing of load-balanced applications traffic even if different flows pass through different SoftGate nodes.
NAT & Conntrack – Netris algorithms use special techniques to minimize and localize memory consumption for connection tracking, which allows SoftGate to perform NAT-ing in a horizontally scalable fashion, critical for cloud provider use cases.
Management
SoftGate nodes are automatically managed through the Netris Controller, which provides essential health monitoring and telemetry. Netris Controller also provides interfaces to create and manage network services to be provided by the SoftGate cluster.
Web Console – becomes the network control center for network engineers, who can optionally provide restricted access to their DevOps, SecOps, and Developer colleagues in a safe, self-service fashion.
Terraform provider – provides full coverage of all network policies and cloud abstractions, allowing limitless possibilities for creating NetOps and DevOps pipelines applying modern Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.
RestAPI – covers 100% of Netris functionality, commonly used by cloud provider developers to embed Netris functionalities into their user-facing cloud controller, billing systems, and UIs, hiding Netris from the end users.
Integrations
Leverage our native integrations with modern compute platforms to deliver complete end-to-end cloud networking.
Kubernetes – natively support services of LoadBalancer type, CNI upstream routing, or develop custom functions by editing our Kubernetes operator code.
Apache CloudStack – go beyond VLAN limits by using the Netris VXLAN isolation method right from the Apache CloudStack for hyper-scalable virtual networks. Offload the virtual router functionality to Netris SoftGate to launch scalable public cloud services.
NVIDIA – Netris integrates with several NVIDIA Enterprise AI components for smoother operation of GPU-based AI cloud.
Vmware – Automatically create VLANs and VXLANs in the switch fabric according to virtual networks created in the Vmware VSphere. Use Netris cloud networking functions for ACLs, NAT, and VM Load Balancing.
