US Patent 11570092 Methods for active-active stateful network service cluster

For a managed network, some embodiments provide a method for a set of service nodes in an active-active service node cluster in conjunction with a host computer hosting a destination data compute node (DCN) to improve the efficiency of directing a data message to a service node storing state information for the flow to which the data message belongs. a first service node receives a data message in a particular data message flow for which it does not maintain state information. The first service node then identifies a second service node to process the data message and forwards the data message to the second service node. The second service node sends state information for the particular data message flow to the first service node, for the first service node to use to process subsequent data messages in the particular data message flow.