Russinovich demonstrated updating the network stack on Azure Boost, which can be done in under 250ms, with minimal network freeze and no effect on current connections. At the same time, Azure Boost can host complex software-defined networking rules, speeding up complex policies. The aim here is to be able to scale out the networking stack on demand.
Improving Azure’s networking hardware
Dynamic scaling of the Azure networking stack starts with custom smart switch hardware, based on Microsoft’s SONiC software-defined networking (SDN) stack. Azure is now deploying its own SDN hardware, using this new smart switch software, Dash, with custom data processing units (DPUs) to offload processing. This allows the SDN appliance to manage more than 1.5 million connections per second. To increase performance, all Azure needs to do is add more DPUs to its SDN appliances, ready to support demand.
Hardware innovations like these support software innovations and how Microsoft runs its platforms. As Russinovich noted, “We believe the future of cloud is serverless,” and hardware features like these allow Azure to quickly add capacity and instances to support serverless operations. I recently wrote about one of these new features, Hyperlight, which Russinovich described in his Ignite session. Other tools he touched on included Dapr, Drasi, and Radius.