Skewed Network Latencies on GCP — an Explainer
The folks at Azure are using FPGAs to accelerate network performance (and decrease host-CPU utilization) in their public cloud. There’s a nifty paper about this that was presented at NSDI ’18 (•). It’s worth reading (as is the writeup by Adrian Colyer ), but the following graphs, showing the network performance of Azure vs GCP vs AWS, really caught my eye. /via https://bit.ly/2HGZtBT Ignore the Azure bars (ok, don’t ignore them, they’re pretty nifty, but they’re not the focus here). Notice how GCP’s VM-VM latencies are better than AWS’, but the tail latencies are much worse ? Turns out there is a reason for this, and it’s embedded in the way GCP does networking, and specifically in the way their Andromeda network virtualization stack works. /via https://bit.ly/2HGZtBT You can ignore most of the stuff in the stack (shown above), except for the “ Hoverboard ”, which is, in effect a sidecar that is used to proce...