Dynamic reverse proxy chain generation for networks in data centers

Abstract

Reverse proxy, as one of the important components required by the data center to provide application services, has functions of access control, load balancing, connecting to different types of networks, etc. In the future, as the application services requiring reverse proxy further increase, network types become more and more diverse and complex, and the network hierarchy becomes higher and higher, reverse proxy will change from a single layer to multiple layers to form a reverse proxy chain. The construction of the reverse proxy chain will become one of the bottlenecks of data center networking operation and maintenance. In this paper, we propose a method of automatically constructing reverse proxy chains to avoid the problem of manual static configuration of the reverse proxy chain which is time-consuming, laborious, and difficult to maintain. In our software-defined networking experiment, we simulated a full-binary-tree-like topology of 1534 nodes. We recorded the time to generate and remove proxy chains of various lengths. The average time to generate all reverse proxy chains in the topology consisting of 1534 nodes with 100ms delay is around 5100ms, much smaller than manual configuration, which usually needs several hours.