CCAaaS: An Orchestration Platform for High-Velocity Design, Development, and Deployment of Data Center Transports at Meta

Abstract

Today, data center networks run multiple congestion control algorithms (CCAs), each tailored to distinct traffic characteristics, from latency-sensitive intra-region RPCs to high-throughput cross-region AI workloads. The rapid evolution of AI training and inference further accelerates this trend by continually introducing new traffic characteristics that demand new CCAs. This paper introduces CCA-as-a-Service (CCAaaS), our eBPF-based ecosystem for the rapid design, deployment, and operation of production-grade CCAs at hyperscale. We present (1) a modular BPF-TCP framework and general lessons for designing modular CCAs; (2) a deployment and orchestration layer that provides disruption-free CCA updates, along with best practices for managing a zoo of CCAs at scale; and (3) a lightweight observability tool for CCAs and a blueprint for scaling CCA observability. CCAaaS manages over 97% of our server-to-server traffic using three active eBPF-based CCAs; two of the five CCAs we have built have since been deprecated. We show that our eBPF-centric approach to CCAs development delivers the same application-level performance (retransmissions, bandwidth, and tail latency) as their native in-kernel counterparts, and that our custom CCAs add negligible CPU and memory cost over their eBPF baselines. In terms of realized benefits, the CCA built with CCAaaS significantly improved network, and application metrics, for example, one of our CCAs reduced P99 latency for cross-region services by up to 20X.