Phoenix Dataplane Service

Documentation

Phoenix is a dataplane service which serves as a framework to develop and deploy various kinds of managed services.

The key features of Phoenix include:

Modular Plugin System: Phoenix provides an engine abstraction which, as the modular unit, can be developed, dynamically load, scheduled, and even be live upgraded with minimal disruption to user applications.

High-performance Networking: Phoenix offers managed access to networking devices while exposing a user-friendly API.

Policy Manageability: Phoenix supports application-layer policies which can be specified by infrastructure administers to gain visibility and control user application behaviors.

Getting Started

Building Phoenix

1. Clone the repo and its submodules.

$ git clone git@github.com:phoenix-dataplane/phoenix.git --recursive

2. Install required packages. Make sure you have libibverbs, librdmacm, libnuma, protoc, libclang, and cmake available on your system. Additionally, you need to have rustup and cargo-make installed. For Ubuntu 22.04, you can use the following commands:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install libclang-dev libnuma-dev librdmacm-dev libibverbs-dev protobuf-compiler cmake
$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
$ cargo install cargo-make

Alternatively, if you already have VS Code and Docker installed, click the badge above or here to start.

3. Build and run PhoenixOS service.

$ cargo make

By default, cargo make will build the dev-test-flow target. You can inspect and customize the stages of this workflow in Makefile.toml. Use cargo make run-phoenixos to start the service after building.

You can also manually execute each step in the dev-test-flow.

PhoenixOS without any plugins is just an empty control plane. Next, you can build and load some useful plugins and run a few user applications.

Building and Running mRPC

mRPC is the first experimental feature on Phoenix. To build and deploy mRPC plugins, and run PhoenixOS, follow these steps:

$ cd experimental/mrpc
$ cat load-mrpc-plugins.toml >> ../../phoenix.toml
$ cargo make

Ensure that exactly one instance of PhoenixOS is running on each server.

Note: If you have multiple machines, update the destination address in experimental/mrpc/examples/rpc_hello/src/client.rs to your server address.

Next, build the rpc_echo example:

$ cargo build --release --workspace -p rpc_echo

You can also build all mRPC examples using:

$ cargo make build-mrpc-examples

Note: building phoenixos and its plugins requires the plugins to link with a prebuilt set of phoenix crates. This is currently done by tools/phoenix_cargo and the entire workflow is handled by cargo-make. However, building user libraries and apps does not require that. We can still use cargo.

Running mRPC examples

You can run the examples manually by

$ cargo rr -p rpc_echo --bin rpc_echo_server
# In a seperate terminal
$ cargo rr -p rpc_echo --bin rpc_echo_client

Note: If you have multiple machines, we provide a launcher to help with running the examples:

$ cd ../../benchmark
# Follow the README under benchmark directory and update config.toml
$ cargo rr --bin launcher -- --benchmark benchmark/rpc_echo.toml

You can explore the set of mRPC user applications in experimental/mrpc/examples.

Learning More

Documentation

License

Phoenix is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.