Amazon Technologies, Inc.

David Alonso Flamini

Stefan Christian Richter

Patricio Giecco

Orlando Maldonado

Lincoln Travis Dale

Thomas Shine

A computer-networking system is described to leverage traffic splits naturally occurring in Clos fabrics along the path to a top tier of the fabric. Using the traffic splits, a result similar to or the same as WECMP can be implemented but using less network-device overhead. The system introduces another level of indirection abstracting sets of outgoing next hops across tier 1 devices in the fabric and leveraging ECMP or WECMP to manage the capacity. Incoming traffic flows are split as they get forwarded across the fabric due to the fabric's topology, routing design, and/or the pattern of external connections. These traffic splits are leveraged in creating forwarding tables for the network devices, thereby making the scaling model for WECMP a function of the outgoing external connections of the fabric rather than the number of traffic flow destinations in the network domain.

Routing network traffic in Clos fabrics

In a network device, unidirectional port aggregation can be used by aggregating corresponding ports that represent a single underlay next hop. A common layer 2 address (e.g., Media Access Control (MAC) address) can be shared across aggregated destination network devices to allow these network devices to accept traffic forwarded over the unidirectional multi-destination bond port. Port aggregations (e.g., 'bonds', “trunks”, etc.) are controlled by dynamic route updates propagating through a network of devices. Dynamic route updates can be implemented as part of routing protocols. The route updates can be interpreted by the network switches as including a port aggregation signal. Policy may be applied to these route updates to adjust the behavior of the port aggregation mechanism. The resulting port aggregation is installed in the forwarding table of network devices so that the corresponding prefixes resolve to the underlay next hop representing the aggregated port.

Network device with port aggregation for forwarding network traffic

Systems and methods are disclosed for generating synthetic representations of a network and performing path computations using the synthetic representations. A model of the network is created including different representations for different regions of the network based on the network mesh patterns (e.g., a sparse mesh representation, a Clos mesh representation, and a flat mesh representation). The generated representations include synthetic, aggregated nodes and/or links in the represented region that are determined based on different processes according to the type of mesh in the region. Path computations are performed for each representation (e.g., in parallel), then joined to form end-to-end paths between a source and a destination. The computed paths may be used to select a path for routing data through the network.

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Dublin, Ireland

David Alonso Flamini