@Scale
Deploying Segment Routing over IPv6 eliminates protocol translation bottlenecks while delivering scalable traffic engineering and inline security across cloud interconnects.
AI-assisted summary of Building Scalable AI Cloud Interconnects with SRv6 | Alexey Gorovoy, Nebius — original source. Check the original for full context.
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## Background Published on YouTube by @Scale on August 27, 2026, this presentation features Alexey Gorovoy from Nebius explaining how to build scalable AI cloud interconnects using SRv6. According to the page description, the session showcases Nebius' evolving customer cloud interconnect architecture, demonstrating how SRv6 bridges virtual cloud environments and physical network edges to provide end-to-end VPN and Traffic Engineering services without protocol translation.
## TL;DR Alexey Gorovoy details how Nebius evolved its infrastructure to meet exploding, multi-terabit bandwidth demands and dynamic inline security requirements for AI workloads. By replacing traditional hybrid stacks (VXLAN/EVPN in the data center and MPLS-SR in the WAN) with a unified SRv6 uSID architecture, Nebius eliminated complex stitching gateways and VRF terminations on intermediate hardware. The presentation covers their implementation using VPP-based Cloud Gateways, the integration of service-aware firewalls via SR-TE policies, key migration learnings such as RFC 8950 compliance, and future roadmap plans for custom TE controllers and complete legacy protocol replacement.
## Atmosphere & style The session is clear, structured, and deeply technical, carrying the pragmatic tone of a network engineer sharing production-tested architectural solutions. It feels like an engaging white-board style tech talk where complex operational hurdles—such as domain-stitching choke points—are dismantled methodically in favor of elegant engineering design. Gorovoy maintains a focused, authoritative delivery, balancing high-level architectural motivation with precise practical insights.
## Key takeaways - [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) Nebius is an AI-native cloud provider designed to give AI customers a full-stack environment to train, build, and deploy models on large-scale GPU clusters. - [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) Traditional interconnect architectures rely on separate protocol stacks across WAN, backbone, and data center domains, creating performance bottlenecks and operational complexity at translation boundaries. - [02:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=136s) Customer interconnect requirements shifted from best-effort internet data ingestion to dedicated private links with multi-terabit bandwidth and inline security services. - [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) Nebius moved away from VXLAN/EVPN and MPLS-SR because VXLAN lacks native Traffic Engineering and MPLS-SR is ill-suited for host-centric data center environments. - [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) Using separate protocols requires stitching gateways that cause vendor inconsistency, hardware performance hits, and forced VRF terminations. - [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) SRv6 unifies data center and WAN transport into a single IPv6-based encapsulation, eliminating protocol translation while providing end-to-end Traffic Engineering. - [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) SRv6 micro-segmentation (uSID) compresses multiple Segment IDs into a single 128-bit IPv6 destination address, keeping header overhead minimal for host software routers. - [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) Underlay networks remain stateless standard IPv6 routers without needing to maintain customer VRFs or perform translation. - [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) Nebius transitioned security services from SRv6-unaware firewalls attached via proxy service leaves to SRv6 service-aware firewalls that scale dynamically across the IPv6 network. - [11:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=719s) Nebius selected Vector Packet Processing (VPP) for its Cloud Gateway software to achieve high-performance SRv6 packet processing on compute hosts. - [11:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=719s) Dual-stack migrations can occur smoothly by enabling IS-IS version 6 with SRv6 extensions alongside existing IPv4/MPLS topologies. - [11:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=719s) Advertising BGP VPNv4 routes over an IPv6 next-hop infrastructure requires strict compliance with RFC 8950. - [15:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=902s) Future engineering initiatives include expanding SRv6 across DCI/internet edges, building native SRv6 firewalls, and developing an dynamic in-house TE controller.
## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) Evolving Customer Cloud Interconnect Architecture with SRv6
Alexey Gorovoy, a network engineer at Nebius, introduces his presentation on how the company is evolving its customer cloud interconnect architecture using SRv6 (Segment Routing over IPv6) as a foundational building block. Nebius is an AI-focused cloud provider specializing in high-performance hardware and software development, building large-scale GPU clusters, and operating an AI-native cloud computing platform designed to give AI customers a full-stack environment to train, build, and deploy models.
To set the stage, Alexey frames the broader cloud industry challenge: cloud providers routinely offer private interconnect solutions to link customer premises to virtual cloud environments. These private links require strict tenant isolation, predictable bandwidth, and seamless security integration. In traditional cloud architectures, traffic passing from the customer edge to a virtual machine (VM) must cross disparate network domains—such as the WAN edge, backbone core, data center fabric, and compute host. Because each domain traditionally relies on its own separate protocol stack optimized in isolation, connecting them end-to-end introduces friction, protocol translation points, complex service boundaries, and performance bottlenecks.
- **Speaker:** Alexey Gorovoy, Network Engineer at Nebius. - **Company Core Focus:** Large-scale GPU cluster building, AI-native cloud computing platform development, and full-stack AI infrastructure. - **Core Requirements for Customer Interconnects:** Tenant isolation, guaranteed predictable bandwidth, and integrated network security services. - **Traditional Interconnect Pitfalls:** Domain-specific protocol stacks that require stitching and translation at domain boundaries, creating operational and scale bottlenecks.
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[02:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=136s) Legacy Network Architecture and Its Scaling Limits
Nebius operates a global footprint spanning multiple data center regions across Europe and the United States, tied together via a private backbone alongside independent local internet connections and Points of Presence (PoPs). Originally, customer interconnect demands were relatively modest and localized: customers primarily needed to ingest large datasets into the Nebius cloud during initial onboarding. Because data was ingested locally into a specific region via the public internet and stored for subsequent model training, traffic rarely traversed inter-region backbones.
Under this initial design, Nebius built its frontend and data center infrastructure heavily around IPv6. Compute clusters, storage arrays, and cloud services operated natively on IPv6. The architecture relied on two key in-house software functions built on open-source software: the **Cloud Gateway** (serving as the exit/entry point for customer VMs using a VXLAN/EVPN stack) and an in-house **Firewall**. Across the private WAN backbone, Nebius employed traditional MPLS Segment Routing (MPLS-SR) to deliver Layer 3 VPN services to reach the internet. While this hybrid setup (VXLAN/EVPN in the data center, MPLS-SR in the WAN) worked initially, changing customer requirements exposed major scaling limits:
- **Demand Shift:** Customers moved from best-effort public internet ingestion to requesting dedicated, private, ultra-high-bandwidth interconnect links. - **Exploding Scale:** Bandwidth demands scaled rapidly from tens of gigabits to hundreds of gigabits, reaching multi-terabit requirements in certain customer deployments. - **Integrated Services:** Customers increasingly required inline security services—such as end-to-end encryption and mandatory firewall inspection—embedded directly into the transport path. - **Protocol Boundary Bottlenecks:** Extending high-bandwidth customer VPNs with dynamic Traffic Engineering (TE) from a remote WAN PoP across the backbone into the data center host exposed the VXLAN-to-MPLS stitching point as a severe operational and performance choke point.
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[05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) Choosing SRv6 over Legacy Protocol Stacks
To build a seamless bridge between virtual cloud environments and physical edge networks, Nebius re-evaluated its end-to-end protocol choices. While VXLAN with EVPN is widely adopted across vendor hardware and open-source tooling, it lacks native Traffic Engineering (TE) capabilities; inserting dynamic service chains (like firewalls) into VXLAN overlays requires inflexible and complex routing workarounds. Conversely, while MPLS-SR offers robust Traffic Engineering across WAN domains, it is ill-suited and rarely deployed natively inside host-based data center environments.
Using two separate protocol stacks requires intermediary "stitching gateways" that translate headers and terminate VRFs between domains. In practice, these translation gateways suffer from inconsistent vendor feature support, severe hardware performance degradation, and massive architectural complexity. SRv6 solves these issues by offering an elegant compromise: it maintains a lightweight "IP-in-IP style" overlay format while delivering powerful, end-to-end Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE) capabilities that span seamlessly from physical WAN routers to virtualized compute hosts.
- **VXLAN/EVPN Limitations:** Broad multi-vendor interoperability, but lacks granular native Traffic Engineering, making dynamic service insertion rigid. - **MPLS-SR Limitations:** Excellent WAN traffic steering, but practically inapplicable inside host-centric data center fabrics. - **Stitching Gateway Drawbacks:** Vendor implementation gaps, platform hardware performance hits, high operational complexity, and forced VRF termination on middleboxes. - **The SRv6 Solution:** Unifies data center and WAN transport into a single IPv6-based encapsulation, eliminating stitching points while preserving flexible TE capabilities.
---
[08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) Key Use Cases: SRv6 uSID Overlay and Firewall Insertion
Nebius implemented SRv6 micro-segmentation (**uSID**) to deliver Layer 3 VPN multi-tenancy across its entire fleet. By deploying SRv6 endpoint functionality solely at the domain edges—the Cloud Gateway on the hypervisor side and the Border Router at the physical network edge—both ends act as standard L3VPN Provider Edge (PE) nodes. Underlay networks simply route standard IPv6 locator prefixes without needing to maintain customer VRFs or perform protocol translation. Furthermore, uSID technology compresses multiple Segment IDs into a single 128-bit IPv6 destination address header. By keeping locator allocations clean and capping active segments to six or fewer, Nebius completely avoids inserting additional Segment Routing Headers (SRH), significantly reducing header overhead and optimizing processing performance for host-based software routers.
For security, Nebius initially deployed an **SRv6-unaware firewall service**. In this mode, standard firewalls connect to the data center fabric via dedicated SRv6-enabled "service leaf" proxy nodes. These service leaves advertise Node and Adjacency SIDs that Cloud Gateways and Border Routers reference within SR-TE policies to steer specific customer traffic through the firewall. Moving forward, Nebius is transitioning toward **SRv6 service-aware firewalls**, removing proxy node dependencies so firewall instances can attach anywhere on the IPv6 routed network and scale out dynamically on a per-tenant, per-application, or per-segment basis.
``` +------------------+ +----------------------+ +--------------------+ | Cloud Gateway | <=====> | IPv6 Underlay Fabric | <=====> | Border Router | | (VPP-based Host) | uSID | (No VRFs / No Translation) uSID | (WAN / Edge PE) | +------------------+ +----------------------+ +--------------------+ | | +----------------- SR-TE Policy Service Chain ------------------+ | [ Service-Aware Firewall ] ```
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[11:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=719s) Production Implementation Experience and Migration Lessons
Transitioning to SRv6 provided key practical insights across interoperability, host software selection, and dual-stack migration strategies:
- **Vendor Interoperability:** Testing and production deployments confirmed robust uSID interoperability across diverse hardware switching platforms in the Nebius backbone. - **VPP Host Datapath:** For its Cloud Gateway software, Nebius selected **FD.io VPP (Vector Packet Processing)** as the foundation, allowing flexible, high-performance SRv6 packet processing and custom network programming directly on host servers. - **Dual-Stack Migration Path:** Traditional IPv4/MPLS networks can migrate smoothly with minimal service disruption. Operators can enable IPv6 routing alongside IS-IS version 6 with SRv6 extensions while leaving existing IPv4/MPLS IS-IS topologies intact during transition. - **RFC 8950 Compliance:** When advertising BGP VPNv4 routes over an IPv6 next-hop infrastructure, network equipment must strictly support RFC 8950 (IPv6 Next Hop Address Encoding for BGP-4). - **Locator Address Architecture:** Carefully designing the IPv6 locator block is critical, as the locator layout dictates the available headroom for future Traffic Engineering SIDs inside the uSID container.
---
[15:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=902s) Conclusion and Future Roadmap
Alexey concludes by emphasizing that SRv6 successfully eliminates domain boundaries between WAN and data center environments. By concentrating policy at the network edges (Cloud Gateways and Border Routers), intermediate switches remain stateless underlay routers that no longer carry VRF state or execute protocol translation. Complex service insertions—such as mandatory firewall checks—are simplified into clear SR-TE policy definitions applied at the edge.
Looking ahead, Nebius is focusing its engineering roadmap on three main initiatives: 1. **Broader Infrastructure Rollout:** Expanding SRv6 into Data Center Interconnect (DCI) and internet edge domains to completely replace residual VXLAN and legacy MPLS stacks. 2. **Native SRv6 Firewall Development:** Enhancing Nebius' in-house software firewall to natively interpret SRv6 headers, enabling seamless, granular auto-scaling across the compute fabric. 3. **Custom TE Controller:** Developing an in-house dynamic Traffic Engineering controller to program path provisioning and SR policies on demand, replacing static network configurations.
Finally, Alexey highlights a joint **IETF draft** co-authored by Nebius, Cisco, and industry partners, encouraging other cloud operators to review the document as a practical reference architecture for solving modern multi-domain cloud interconnect challenges.
<ElicitationsGroup message="Explore related technical concepts:"> <Elicitation label="Explain how SRv6 uSID packet compression works" query="Explain how SRv6 uSID (micro-segmentation) compresses multiple segment IDs into a single IPv6 destination address."/> <Elicitation label="Compare VXLAN/EVPN vs. SRv6 for Cloud Interconnects" query="Provide a detailed architectural comparison between VXLAN/EVPN and SRv6 for data center and cloud interconnect use cases."/> </ElicitationsGroup>
## Notable quotes > [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) building large-scale GPU clusters, and operating an AI-native cloud computing platform designed to give AI customers a full-stack environment to train, build, and deploy models — Alexey Gorovoy
> [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) cloud providers routinely offer private interconnect solutions to link customer premises to virtual cloud environments — Alexey Gorovoy
> [00:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=5s) Because each domain traditionally relies on its own separate protocol stack optimized in isolation, connecting them end-to-end introduces friction, protocol translation points, complex service boundaries, and performance bottlenecks — Alexey Gorovoy
> [02:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=136s) traffic rarely traversed inter-region backbones — Alexey Gorovoy
> [02:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=136s) extending high-bandwidth customer VPNs with dynamic Traffic Engineering (TE) from a remote WAN PoP across the backbone into the data center host exposed the VXLAN-to-MPLS stitching point as a severe operational and performance choke point — Alexey Gorovoy
> [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) inserting dynamic service chains (like firewalls) into VXLAN overlays requires inflexible and complex routing workarounds — Alexey Gorovoy
> [05:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=330s) it maintains a lightweight "IP-in-IP style" overlay format while delivering powerful, end-to-end Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE) capabilities that span seamlessly from physical WAN routers to virtualized compute hosts — Alexey Gorovoy
> [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) Underlay networks simply route standard IPv6 locator prefixes without needing to maintain customer VRFs or perform protocol translation — Alexey Gorovoy
> [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) By keeping locator allocations clean and capping active segments to six or fewer, Nebius completely avoids inserting additional Segment Routing Headers (SRH) — Alexey Gorovoy
> [08:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=497s) removing proxy node dependencies so firewall instances can attach anywhere on the IPv6 routed network and scale out dynamically on a per-tenant, per-application, or per-segment basis — Alexey Gorovoy
> [11:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=719s) Operators can enable IPv6 routing alongside IS-IS version 6 with SRv6 extensions while leaving existing IPv4/MPLS IS-IS topologies intact during transition — Alexey Gorovoy
> [15:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ&t=902s) By concentrating policy at the network edges (Cloud Gateways and Border Routers), intermediate switches remain stateless underlay routers that no longer carry VRF state or execute protocol translation — Alexey Gorovoy
## Mentioned Alexey Gorovoy, Nebius, @Scale, SRv6, IPv6, IPv4, VXLAN, EVPN, MPLS, MPLS-SR, Cloud Gateway, uSID, SR-TE, FD.io VPP, IS-IS, BGP, RFC 8950, Cisco, IETF
[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4asnbuVPQ)