RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs Daglis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we learned about the [increased tail-latency sensitivity of microservices based applications with high RPC fan-outs. Seer uses estimates of queue depths to mitigate latency spikes on the order of 10-100ms, in conjunction with a cluster manager. Today’s paper choice, RPCValet, operates at ... Continue Reading

Slim: OS kernel support for a low-overhead container overlay network Zhuo et al., NSDI'19 Container overlay networks rely on packet transformations, with each packet traversing the networking stack twice on its way from the sending container to the receiving container. There are CPU, throughput, and latency overheads associated with those traversals. In this paper, we ... Continue Reading

Understanding lifecycle management complexity of datacenter topologies Zhang et al., NSDI'19 There has been plenty of interesting research on network topologies for datacenters, with Clos-like tree topologies and Expander based graph topologies both shown to scale using widely deployed hardware. This research tends to focus on performance properties such as throughput and latency, together with ... Continue Reading

BDS: A centralized near-optimal overlay network for inter-datacenter data replication Zhang et al., EuroSys'18 (If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site). This is the story of how inter-datacenter multicast transfers at Baidu were sped-up by a ... Continue Reading

Stateless datacenter load-balancing with Beamer Olteanu et al., NSDI'18 We’ve spent the last couple of days looking at datacenter network infrastructure, but we didn’t touch on the topic of load balancing. For a single TCP connection, you want all of the packets to end up at the same destination. Logically, a load balancer (a.k.a. ‘mux’) ... Continue Reading