Enabling In-Network Acceleration Over the Cloud

Offloading computing and storage to programmable switches, or in-network acceleration (INA), is a recent wisdom to speed up distributed applications. Researchers have proposed a variety of tailored INA solutions for separate applications with different data-plane layouts and network protocols. However, as hardware resource of programmable switches is limited, it is hard to integrate all these INA solutions simultaneously. Consequently, specialized INA techniques cannot realize full potential on the cloud, which needs to support various applications and requires concurrent access by multi-tenants.

To enable on-demand INA service on the cloud, we present a generic INA framework called INAaaS (INA as a Service). At its core, INAaaS provides a universal INA interface in network and offers application-specific adapters on end-hosts. It further addresses the isolation problem of different applications, and guarantees the reliability and correctness. Our evaluation shows that INAaaS effectively improves the performance of various cloud applications, competing with the specific solutions.