Speaker: Prateek Sahu
Title: Characterization of network proxies in micro-service orchestration
Date: October 8th, 2024 at 3:30 pm
Location: EER 3.646 or Zoom Link
Abstract:
Network proxies, aka sidecars, are used by organizations to manage and run hundreds of cloud microservices in a consistent manner. Since sidecars interpose on network traffic to provide telemetry and security features, they can degrade critical service level metrics such as latency and throughput. However, the precise impact of sidecars on such key metrics is unclear. We introduce SCoPE to quantify service-layer overheads as well as the micro-architectural implications of using sidecars in service meshes – and characterize these overheads across a range of sidecar configurations. SCoPE demonstrates that sidecars can degrade latency and throughput by up to 150% and 35%, respectively, across common benchmark applications. We find that the absolute overheads of the sidecars are independent of the microservices being proxied and depend on the proxy configuration and the microservice topology. Our micro-architectural analysis of sidecars indicates no discernible reuse of the instruction caches (i.e., poor misses per kilo instructions/MPKI) despite high-frequency reuse of sidecars. We note that increasing the private caches from 256KB to 1.25MB across processor generations sees only a 10% improvement in the processor frontend – this is due to high indirect branch misses and thrashing from more aggressive prefetchers and predictors that degrade the L1-I cache MPKIs up to 40%. Our analysis also finds that utilizing a few large pages can reduce iTLB misses and page walks by 80% at the cost of modest memory overheads.
Bio:
Prateek is a 5th year PhD student in ACSES, working with Dr. Mohit Tiwari in the SPARK Research Lab. His interests include hardware and systems security. He is currently working towards cross stack system security and orchestration while his prior work have included hardware side-channel attacks and defenses.