Patent 10079718 was granted and assigned to Amazon on September, 2018 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A network traffic processing device (NTPD) implements a plurality of virtual network traffic processing devices (VNTPDs), a control plane, and an NTPD manager. The plurality of VNTPDs are configured to perform respective versions of a network processing function on network transmissions, where at least two of the respective versions are different. The control plane is configured to select, for a network transmission based on a management policy, one or more of the VNTPDs to perform respective versions of the network processing function. The NTPD manager is configured to monitor results of the selected VNTPDs performing the respective versions of the network processing function and, based on the monitored results, to determine a configuration change for one or more of the VNTPDs or to control output of the network transmission.