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SmartSwitch: Blurring the Line Between Network Infrastructure & Cloud Applications

A revolution is beginning in communication networks with the adoption of network function virtualization, which allows network services to be run on common off-the-shelf hardware--even in virtual machines--to increase flexibility and lower cost. An exciting prospect for cloud users is that these software-based network services can be merged with compute and storage resources to flexibly integrate all of the cloud's resources. 
 
We are developing an application aware networking platform that can perform not only basic packet switching, but also typical functions left to compute platforms such as load balancing based on application-level state, localized data caching, and even arbitrary computation. Our prototype "memcached-aware smart switch" reduces request latency by half and increases throughput by eight fold compared to Twitter's TwemProxy. We also describe how a Hadoop-aware switch could automatically cache data blocks near worker nodes, or perform some computation directly on the data stream. This approach enables a new breed of application designs that blur the line between the cloud's network and its servers.