Middleboxes (e.g., load balancers and WAN optimizers) are an important part of many application deployments. However, cloud providers and third party frameworks only offer a limited set of add-on middlebox services. Providers have not created the necessary mechanisms for cloud tenants to flexibly and efficiently deploy middleboxes from vendors of their choosing.
Stratos addresses this gap by treating middleboxes as first-class entities. It provides abstractions for tenants to specify their middlebox needs, and it automatically deploys and scales middleboxes in a way that maximizes performance, minimizes cost, and efficiently uses a provider's network. Stratos can be deployed by providers of public or private infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, providers or vendors interested in offering middleboxes-as-a-service, or network providers interested in network functions virtualization.