Stable and Fault-Tolerant Decentralized Traffic Engineering

Abstract

Cloud providers have recently decentralized their wide-area network traffic engineering (TE) systems to contain the impact of TE controller failures. In the decentralized design, a controller fault only impacts its slice of the network, limiting the blast radius to a fraction of the network. However, we find that autonomous slice controllers can arrive at divergent traffic allocations that overload links by 30% beyond their capacity. We present Symphony, a decentralized TE system that addresses the challenge of divergence-induced congestion while preserving the fault-isolation benefits of decentralization. By augmenting TE objectives with quadratic regularization, Symphony makes traffic allocations robust to demand perturbations, ensuring TE controllers naturally converge to compatible allocations without coordination. In parallel, Symphony's randomized slicing algorithm partitions the network to minimize blast radius by distributing critical traffic sources across slices, preventing any single failure from becoming catastrophic. These innovations work in tandem: regularization ensures algorithmic stability to traffic allocations while intelligent slicing provides architectural resilience in the network. Through extensive evaluation on cloud provider WANs, we show Symphony reduces divergence-induced congestion by 14x and blast radius by 79% compared to current practice.