Triton: A Flexible Hardware Offloading Architecture for Accelerating Apsara vSwitch in Alibaba Cloud
Xing Li, Xiaochong Jiang, Ye Yang, Lilong Chen, Yi Wang, Chao Wang, Chao Xu, Yilong Lv, Bowen Yang, Taotao Wu, H. Gao, Zikang Chen, Yisong Qiao, Hongwei Ding, Yijian Dong, Hang Yang, Jianming Song, Jianyuan Lu, Pengyu Zhang, Chengkun Wei, Zihui Zhang, Wenzhi Chen, Qinming He, Shunmin Zhu
Abstract
Apsara vSwitch (AVS) is a per-host deployed forwarding component for instance network connectivity in the Alibaba Cloud. To meet the growing performance demands, we accelerated AVS by adopting the most widely used "Sep-path" offloading architecture, which introduces a separate hardware data path to speed up popular traffic. However, the deployment results prove that it is difficult to bridge the gap in performance and programming flexibility of the software and hardware data paths, resulting in unpredictable performance and low iteration velocity.