Update: Camera-ready is now available online!
This is kinda old news now, but still as exciting as it was few days ago. Our paper “FairCloud: Sharing the Network in Cloud Computing” has been accepted for publication at this year’s SIGCOMM. We explore the design space of sharing networks, identify tradeoffs, and place categorize different strategies based on their characteristics. In case you are following our Orchestra work, FairCloud sits in the Inter-Transfer Controller (ITC) of the Orchestra hierarchy.
The network, similar to CPU and memory, is a critical and shared resource in the cloud. However, unlike other resources, it is neither shared proportionally to payment, nor do cloud providers offer minimum guarantees on network bandwidth. The reason is that networks are more difficult to share, since the network allocation of a VM X depends not only on the VMs running on the same machine with X, but also on the other VMs that X communicates with, as well as on the cross-traffic on each link used by X. In this paper, we start from the above requirements—payment proportionality and minimum guarantees—and show that the network- specific challenges lead to fundamental tradeoffs when sharing datacenter networks. We then propose a set of properties to explicitly express these tradeoffs. Finally, we propose three allocation policies that allow us to navigate the tradeoff space. We evaluate their characteristics through simulation and testbed experiments, showing that they are able to provide minimum guarantees and achieve better proportionality with the per-VM payment than known allocations.
This year 32 out of 235 papers have been accepted at SIGCOMM. On other news, Berkeley has seven papers in this SIGCOMM!!!