US Patent 11171920 Publication of firewall configuration

A novel method for distributing firewall configuration of a software defined data center is provided. The network manager of the data center receives update requests from tenants of the data center and correspondingly generates update fragments and delivers the generated update fragment to local control planes controlling the enforcing devices. Each local control plane in turn integrates the update fragments it receives into its firewall rules table. For each rule and/or section thusly integrated, the local control plane uses the rule or the section's assigned priority number to establish ordering in the firewall rules table of the local control plane.