Modern cloud networks are a fundamental pillar of data-intensive applications. They provide high-speed transaction (packet) rates and low overhead, enabling, for instance, truly scalable database designs. These networks, however, are fundamentally different from conventional ones. Arguably, the two key discerning technologies are RDMA and programmable network devices. Today, these technologies are not niche technologies anymore and are widely deployed across all major cloud vendors. The question is thus not if but how a new breed of data-intensive applications can benefit from modern networks, given the perceived difficulty in using and programming them. This tutorial addresses these challenges by exposing how the underlying principles changed as the network evolved and by presenting the new system design opportunities they opened. In the process, we also discuss several hard-earned lessons accumulated by making the transition first-hand.

Modern DBMS engines can achieve unprecedented transaction processing speeds thanks to the invention of clever data structures, concurrency schemes, and improvements in CPU and memory subsystems. However, developing realistic and efficient networked clients to benchmark these systems remains daunting. Simply put, traditional client-side networking stacks present high overheads and thus cannot exercise the high performance that modern DBMSs can, in principle, provide. In this demo, we propose a different approach to benchmarking; we showcase a new framework that leverages hardware-software co-design. With our system, which we call the DBMS Annihilator, workloads are specified using a high-level language that is then converted into hardware (FPGA) for execution. The hardware we use is a commodity Smart NIC, allowing workloads to be fully reproducible to anyone using such hardware. A software console and dashboard provide real-time visibility and interactivity, which we explore in this demo.

In this paper, we explore how programmable data planes can naturally provide a higher-level of service to user applications via a new abstraction called packet subscriptions. Packet subscriptions generalize forwarding rules, and can be used to express both traditional routing and more esoteric, content-based approaches. We present strategies for routing with packet subscriptions in which a centralized controller has a global view of the network, and the network topology has a hierarchical or general structure. We also describe a compiler for packet subscriptions that uses a novel BDD-based algorithm to efficiently translate predicates into P4 tables that can support O(100K) expressions. Using our system, we have built eight diverse applications. We show that these applications can be deployed in brownfield networks while performing line-rate message processing, using the full switch bandwidth of 6.5Tbps.

We introduce Transaction Triaging, a set of techniques that manipulate streams of transaction requests and responses while they travel to and from a database server. Compared to normal transaction streams, the triaged ones execute faster once they reach the database. The triaging algorithms do not interfere with the transaction execution nor require adherence to any particular concurrency control method, making them easy to port across database systems. Transaction Triaging leverages recent programmable networking hardware that can perform computations on in-flight data. We evaluate our techniques on an in-memory database system using an actual programmable hardware network switch. Our experimental results show that triaging brings enough performance gains to compensate for almost all networking overheads. In high-overhead network stacks such as UDP/IP, we see throughput improvements from 2.05X to 7.95X. In an RDMA stack, the gains range from 1.08X to 1.90X without introducing significant latency.

In this paper, we explore how programmable data planes can naturally provide a higher-level of service to user applications via a new abstraction called packet subscriptions. Packet subscriptions generalize forwarding rules, and can be used to express both traditional routing and more esoteric, content-based approaches. We present strategies for routing with packet subscriptions in which a centralized controller has a global view of the network, and the network topology is organized as a hierarchical structure. We also describe a compiler for packet subscriptions that uses a novel BDD-based algorithm to efficiently translate predicates into P4 tables that can support O(100K) expressions. Using our system, we have built three diverse applications. We show that these applications can be deployed in brownfield networks while performing line-rate message processing, using the full switch bandwidth of 6.5Tbps.

In this paper, we explore how programmable data planes can provide a higher-level of service to user applications via a new abstraction called packet subscriptions. Packet subscriptions generalize forwarding rules, and can be used to express both traditional routing and more esoteric, content-based approaches. We describe a compiler for packet subscriptions that uses a novel BDD-based algorithm to efficiently translate predicates into P4 tables that can support O(100K) expressions. Using our compiler, we've built a proof-of-concept pub/sub financial application for splitting market feeds (e.g., Nasdaq's ITCH protocol) with line-rate message processing, using the full switch bandwidth of 6.5Tbps.