Small is better

Yunjing Xu, Michael Bailey, Brian Noble, Farnam Jahanian
2013 Proceedings of the 4th annual Symposium on Cloud Computing - SOCC '13  
Public clouds have become a popular platform for building Internet-scale applications. Using virtualization, public cloud services grant customers full control of guest operating systems and applications, while service providers still retain the management of their host infrastructure. Because applications built with public clouds are often highly sensitive to response time, infrastructure builders strive to reduce the latency of their data center's internal network. However, most existing
more » ... ions require modification to the software stack controlled by guests. We introduce a new host-centric solution for improving latency in virtualized cloud environments. In this approach, we extend a classic scheduling principle-Shortest Remaining Time First-from the virtualization layer, through the host network stack, to the network switches. Experimental and simulation results show that our solution can reduce median latency of small flows by 40%, with improvements in the tail of almost 90%, while reducing throughput of large flows by less than 3%.
doi:10.1145/2523616.2523620 dblp:conf/cloud/XuBNJ13 fatcat:4cl5wbtjendnvi6om2rsjngmu4