Bluebird - High-performance SDN for Bare-metal Cloud Services

Explore the design, implementation, and deployment of Bluebird, a high-performance network virtualization system for bare-metal cloud services on Azure. Delve into the technical aspects of this 19-minute conference talk from NSDI '22, which covers the innovative use of programmable switch ASICs in Bluebird's data plane to ensure high performance, scalability, and custom forwarding capabilities. Learn about the control plane's key principles, including route caching, device abstraction, and architectural decoupling, which contribute to the system's scalability and high availability. Gain insights into Bluebird's real-world performance, serving thousands of bare-metal tenant nodes and delivering full line-rate NIC speeds up to 100Gb/s with sub-microsecond latency. Discover the experiences of running bare-metal services on Azure and examine the P4 data plane program utilized in Bluebird-enabled switches.