Characterizing the impact of network latency on cloud-based applications’ performance

Businesses and individuals run increasing numbers of applications in the cloud. The performance of an application running in the cloud depends on the data center conditions and upon the resources committed to an application. Small network delays may lead to a significant performance degradation, which affects both the user’s cost and the service provider’s resource usage, power consumption and data center efficiency. In this work, we quantify the effect of network latency on several typical cloud workloads, varying in complexity and use cases. Our results show that different applications are affected by network latency to differing amounts. These insights into the effect of network latency on different applications have ramifications for workload placement and physical host sharing when trying to reach performance targets

Network Latency Control in Data Centres (Dagstuhl Seminar 16281)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 16281 "Network Latency Control in Data Centres". This seminar explored existing and future techniques for controlling data centre latency and thus explores research directions in the new field of data centre latency control in networking research. This need for a new research direction is motivated by the fact that traditional networking equipment and TCP-IP stacks were designed for wide-area networks, where the goal is to maximize throughput, and the control loop between end systems is measured in 10s of milliseconds. Consequently, this seminar discussed new research direction for data center latency control across the entire software and hardware stack, including in-network solutions, end-host solutions, and others