Programmable Host-Network Traffic Management

Data-center administrators perform traffic-management tasks (e.g., performance monitoring, server load balancing, and traffic engineering) to optimize network performance for diverse applications. Increasingly, traffic-management functionality is moving from the switches to the end hosts, which have more computational resources and better visibility into application behavior. However, traffic management is complicated by the heterogeneous interfaces for monitoring and controlling hosts and switches, and the scalability challenges of collecting and analyzing measurement data across the data center. We present a scalable and programmable platform for joint HOst-NEtwork (HONE) traffic management. HONE’s programming environment gives a simple, integrated, and logically-centralized view of the data center for defining measurement, analysis, and control tasks across hosts and switches. Programmers can think globally and rely on HONE to distribute the program for local execution and scalable aggregation of data across hosts and switches. HONE successfully balances the inherent tension between ease-of-use and performance. We evaluate HONE by implementing several canonical traffic-management applications, measuring its efficiency with micro-benchmarks, and demonstrating its scalability with larger-scale experiments on Amazon EC2.