Software Packet-Level Network Analytics at Cloud Scale

As networks grow in speed, scale, and complexity, operating them reliably requires continuous monitoring and increasingly sophisticated analytics. Because of these requirements, the platforms that support analytics in cloud-scale networks face demands for both higher throughput (to keep up with high packet rates) and increased generality and programmability (to cover a wider range of applications). Recent proposals have worked toward these goals by offloading analytics application logic to line-rate programmable data plane hardware, as scaling existing software analytics platforms is prohibitively expensive. The rigid design and constrained resources of data plane devices, however, fundamentally limit the types of analysis and the number of tasks that can run concurrently. In this article, we demonstrate that generality need not be sacrificed for high performance. Rather than offloading entire analytics applications to hardware, the core idea of our work is to offload only critical preprocessing tasks that are shared among applications (e.g., load balancing) to a line-rate hardware frontend while optimizing the core analytics software to exploit properties of network analytics workloads. Based on this design, we present Jetstream, a hybrid platform for network analytics that can run custom software-based analytics pipelines at throughputs of up to 250 million packets per second on a 16-core commodity server. Jetstream makes sophisticated, network-wide packet analytics feasible without compromising on generality or performance.