Tenant-level network performance isolation in Flowtune

Abstract

Performance isolation is a major concern for multi-tenant datacenters. Many service level agreements include a specification on the allotment of resources. For tenants, these resource guarantees are critical to the availability and efficiency of their services. While CPU, disk, and memory isolation are well-understood, network performance isolation is less straightforward. In this thesis, I investigate methods for enforcing bandwidth fairness guarantees for logical networks in a datacenter and implement network performance isolation in Flowtune. Flowtune is a datacenter network architecture which introduces a centralized arbiter to enforce congestion control at the flowlet level. Flowtune achieves rapid convergence to a desired allocation of network resources in addition to reducing tail latencies in various settings. However, Flowtune currently does not provide tenant-level network performance isolation.