research-article

HEELS: A Host-Enabled eBPF-Based Load Balancing Scheme

Authors:

Marios KogiasAuthors Info & Claims

eBPF '23: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions

Pages 77 - 83

https://doi.org/10.1145/3609021.3609307

Published: 10 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Layer 4 (L4) load balancing is crucial in cloud computing and elastic microservices. Existing L4 load balancer designs can be split into two main categories: centralized designs using a hardware or software middlebox, and decentralized designs in which every node can play the role of the load balancer. Centralized designs offer better scheduling policies and easier worker node management, but suffer from I/O and CPU limitations. Decentralized designs scale better, but are harder to manage. We introduce HEELS, a novel load balancing scheme designed for internal cloud workloads and microservices, achieving the best of both worlds. HEELS uses the load balancer only during the connection establishment and allows clients and servers to communicate directly after that. Supporting general L4 load balancers and requiring no kernel changes, HEELS is readily deployable on the public cloud. We implement HEELS as a set of eBPF programs split across the client and server. Our evaluation shows that HEELS introduces minimal overheads, works with off-the-shelf load balancers (e.g., Katran by Meta), and significantly reduces the costs of cloud load balancers.

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Cited By

Gerhorst LHerzog HWägemann POtt MKapitza RHönig T(2024)VeriFence: Lightweight and Precise Spectre Defenses for Untrusted Linux Kernel ExtensionsProceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3678890.3678907(644-659)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678890.3678907
Bardinelli JZhang YSu JHuang LParilla AJarvi RKulkarni SZhang W(2024)hyDNS: Acceleration of DNS Through Kernel Space ResolutionProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3672197.3673439(58-64)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672197.3673439
Miao CZhong ZXiao YYang FZhang SJiang YBai ZLu CGeng JHe ZWang YZou XYang CSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)MegaTE: Extending WAN Traffic Engineering to Millions of Endpoints in Virtualized CloudProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672242(103-116)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651890.3672242
Show More Cited By

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HEELS: A Host-Enabled eBPF-Based Load Balancing Scheme

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

eBPF '23: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions

September 2023

96 pages

ISBN:9798400702938

DOI:10.1145/3609021

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 10 September 2023

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eBPF '23

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SIGCOMM

eBPF '23: 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions

September 10, 2023

NY, New York, USA

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eBPF '23 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 21 submissions, 57%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 12 of 21 submissions, 57%

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Cited By

Gerhorst LHerzog HWägemann POtt MKapitza RHönig T(2024)VeriFence: Lightweight and Precise Spectre Defenses for Untrusted Linux Kernel ExtensionsProceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3678890.3678907(644-659)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678890.3678907
Bardinelli JZhang YSu JHuang LParilla AJarvi RKulkarni SZhang W(2024)hyDNS: Acceleration of DNS Through Kernel Space ResolutionProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3672197.3673439(58-64)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672197.3673439
Miao CZhong ZXiao YYang FZhang SJiang YBai ZLu CGeng JHe ZWang YZou XYang CSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)MegaTE: Extending WAN Traffic Engineering to Millions of Endpoints in Virtualized CloudProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672242(103-116)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651890.3672242
Vijayakumar RMali MPatil SGomathy VAnandaram H(2024) Analyzing the theoretical merits of Loxi load balancer for improving the efficiency of load balancing in 5G ‐edge IoT applications based on Kubernetes Internet Technology Letters10.1002/itl2.563Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/itl2.563

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