Apsara vSwitch (AVS) is a per-host deployed forwarding component for instance network connectivity in the Alibaba Cloud. To meet the growing performance demands, we accelerated AVS by adopting the most widely used "Sep-path" offloading architecture, which introduces a separate hardware data path to speed up popular traffic. However, the deployment results prove that it is difficult to bridge the gap in performance and programming flexibility of the software and hardware data paths, resulting in unpredictable performance and low iteration velocity.

The vSwitch, as a critical component for Virtual Machine (VM) network connectivity in cloud environments, has prompted increasing attention towards its forwarding performance. While software optimization schemes have limitations in meeting the expanding network capacity demands [11, 12, 15, 17, 18], hardware offloading architectures leveraging SoC, FPGA, and ASIC have been proposed to transfer the match-action workload [1, 3, 6, 7, 13, 16], addressing the growing need for network capacity.

Cloud computing has witnessed tremendous growth, prompting enterprises to migrate to the cloud for reliable and on-demand computing. Within a single Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), the number of instances (such as VMs, bare metals, and containers) has reached millions, posing challenges related to supporting millions of instances with network location decoupling from the underlying hardware, high elastic performance, and high reliability. However, academic studies have primarily focused on specific issues like high-speed data plane and virtualized routing infrastructure, while existing industrial network technologies fail to adequately address these challenges.