Network Stack as a Service, with Henry Xu from City University of Hong Kong

Henry Xu is an assistant

professor in the computer science

department at the City University

of Hong Kong, where he leads the NetX Lab. In this episode, we

discuss the research behind his group's recent paper Network Stack as a Service in

the Cloud, presented at HotNets

2017. The paper has the following abstract:

The tenant network stack is implemented inside the virtual machines in

today's public cloud. This legacy architecture presents a barrier to

protocol stack innovation due to the tight coupling between the network

stack and the guest OS. In particular, it causes many deployment

troubles to tenants and management and efficiency problems to the cloud

provider. To address these issues, we articulate a vision of providing

the network stack as a service. The central idea is to decouple the

network stack from the guest OS, and offer it as an independent entity

implemented by the cloud provider. This re-architecting allows tenants

to readily deploy any stack independent of its kernel, and the provider

to offer meaningful SLAs to tenants by gaining control over the network

stack. We sketch an initial design called NetKernel to accomplish this

vision. Our preliminary testbed evaluation with a prototype shows the

feasibility and benefits of our idea.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The

intro music in this episode is Drive,

featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper

music is Yeah Ant

featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro

music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All

content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.