AppNet: Expressive, Easy to Build, and High-Performance Application Networks

What is AppNet?

AppNet is a framework designed for constructing high-performance application networks for microservices. At its core, AppNet offers a high-level abstraction that facilitates the creation of expressive and performant application networks. Users can define rich, possibly stateful, layer-7 (RPC) processing through match-action rules. AppNet's compiler compiles these specifications and generates high-performance code by optimizing where and how to execute different RPC processing functions.

Details are available in our NSDI paper.

Architecture Overview

AppNet's architecture comprises three key components:

1. AppNet Program: Orchestrates network functionality across microservices using a sequence of elements, each defined by match-action rules that control RPC content and element state.

2. Control Plane:

   • A compiler that processes RPC definitions and chain specifications to generate optimized code modules
   • A controller that maintains global knowledge of network topology, service locations, and available processors through integration with cluster managers (Kubernetes)

3. Data Plane: Consists of various processors (sidecars, middleboxes, and RPC libraries) that execute elemental operations. These processors:

   • Receive compiled RPC processing logic from the control plane
   • Continuously report logs, traces, and runtime metrics to the controller

Supported Data Plane Processors

• Istio(Envoy - via both native C++ filters and WASM plugin)
  • Sidecar Mode
  • Ambient Mode
• gRPC (via Interceptors)
  • Only gRPC-go is supported

Contributors

AppNet is developed and maintained by:

• Xiangfeng Zhu
• Yuyao Wang
• Banruo Liu
• Yongtong Wu
• Nikola Bojanic

Getting help

Please get in touch with Xiangfeng Zhu (xfzhu@cs.washington.edu).