1. A system comprising: a data plane instance configured to utilize a plurality of interconnected feature nodes, forming a software-based graph, to switch and apply features to packets, with the each feature node in the graph containing private feature specific configuration data and feature specific code, and with multiplexing nodes in the software-based graph including pointers utilized to switch a packet to a selected one of multiple nodes connected to the multiplexing node depending on a packet context including a pointer to a location in memory where the packet is stored, packet size, and identity of the packet's input interface; a control plane management module configured to allocate ID values and bind a feature node in the data plane instance to an ID value that identifies the feature node in the data plane instance and with control plane management module configured to maintain a proxy node that represent the feature node in the data plane, with the proxy node including a pointer to the data plane instance and the ID; and a control plane interface configured to isolate details of actual communication between the control plane management module and the software-based graph.