The Andromeda architecture is a two-plane system consisting of a control plane and a data plane.

The control plane consists of controller VMs. These VMs receive a network representation that includes firewall rules, routes, subnets, and VM information. The controllers translate this information into OpenFlow commands and send them to vSwitches through the OpenFlow frontend proxy. Importantly, the control plane is stateless, meaning it doesn’t store network configuration information. This simplifies upgrades and avoids impacting vSwitches during updates.

The data plane runs on physical hardware resources and can process over 3 million packets per second.