A NFV-based KV load balancer for Memcached

Description

This project is abandoned as I am pursuing Ph.D. in another field

This is a network function virtuliazation(NFV) research project, based on OpenNetVM as NFV platform, at GWU with Professor Timothy Wood.

I currently co-op with memebers in GW NFV group on another big project, which was inspired by this repo a lot. It is a L7 stateless load balancer in L4 level--handling Redis load based on TCP-splicing, along with a Redis "NFVlized" solution and a availability solution during Redis migration using NFV.

Before my graduation from master's degree, I firstly implemented a key-value load balancer as a virtualizaed network function with hot key cache and lossy counting pre-cache. Lossy counting was used for hotkey detection(with frequency threshold 0.2 and error rate 0.02, see this paper). Main idea is inspired by NetKV. Later, I prposed a new balancer design with skip list as the second layer cache and implemented set action mechanism. The max throughput of set action reached 7M/sec.

The testing and development enviorment on CloudLab, to which we specially want to say THANK YOU!

Milestone

1. Current packet-level stateless L7 LB

   on going.

2. Old project

   • Implemented load balancing for Memcached set&get action. Balancing mechamism is based on hot-keys detected using lossy counting algothrim.
   • Implemented two layers of caching--one hotkey hash table, another "half-always on" skip list.
   • Max throughput for single key reaches 7M.

Features of old KVLB

• Using DPDK api to create UDP packet
• Testing & using ONVM api to create UDP packet
• Handling Memcached Set action //data consistency
• Two layers of caching
• Managing repliction with DHT

Potential Direction (low priority)

• Self-adaptive lossy counting
• Basic fault tolerance without affecting performance
• TCP-based transmisson
• Propose weighted lossy counting
• Impelementing a pressure testing tool for Memcached

Usage

May not available for public usage in a long time.

I will provide intruction if this research get published someday.

Project structure

Mode     Name
----     ----
d-----   benchmark
d-----   kvlb_nf
d-----   LC-experiments
d-----   udp-test-client

• benchmark: the tool we implemented for stress testing.
• kvlb_nf: the implementation of our key-value load balancer.
• LC-experiments: serval experiments on lossy counting.
• udp-test-client： a demo used to test ONVM working enviorment.

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Code is not up to date. I will publish a paper related to this project within this year, however, thie part of code may not be released since we have a brand new repo.