Empowering Cloud Data Centers with Network Programmability

Cloud data centers are a critical infrastructure for modern Internet services such as web search, social networking and e-commerce. However, the gradual slow-down of Moore’s law has put a burden on the growth of data centers’ performance and energy efficiency. In addition, the increasing of millisecond-scale and microsecond-scale tasks also bring higher requirements to the throughput and latency for the cloud applications. Today’s server-based solutions are hard to meet the performance requirements in many scenarios like resource management, scheduling, high-speed traffic monitoring and testing. In this dissertation, we study these problems from a network perspective. We investigate a new architecture that leverages the programmability of new-generation network switches to improve the performance and reliability of clouds. As programmable switches only provide very limited memory and functionalities, we exploit compact data structures and deeply co-design software and hardware to best utilize the resource. More specifically, this dissertation presents four systems: (i) NetLock: A new centralized lock management architecture that co-designs programmable switches and servers to simultaneously achieve high performance and rich policy support. It provides orders-of-magnitude higher throughput than existing systems with microsecond-level latency, and supports many commonly-used policies such as performance isolation. (ii) HCSFQ: A scalable and practical solution to implement hierarchical fair queueing on commodity hardware at line rate. Instead of relying on a hierarchy of queues with complex queue management, HCSFQ does not keep per-flow states and uses only one queue to achieve hierarchical fair queueing. (iii) AIFO: A new approach for programmable packet scheduling that only uses a single FIFO queue. AIFO utilizes an admission control mechanism to approximate PIFO which is theoretically ideal but hard to implement with commodity devices. (iv) Lumina: A tool that enables fine-grained analysis of hardware network stack. By exploiting network programmability to emulate various network scenarios, Lumina is able to help users understand the micro-behaviors of hardware network stacks