Review of "FairCloud: Sharing The Network In Cloud Computing"

Problem: In the current cloud computing environment. Network is currently shared in a best effort manner, unlike CPU or memory. The key difficulty of sharing network efficiently is the allocation of network for VM X also depends on other VMs that X communicate with.

Key point & trade-off: This paper proposes a set of desirable properties for allocating the network bandwidth at the VM granularity, and show that there exists a fundamental trade-off between the ability to share network according to payment and the ability to provide minimum bandwidth guarantees. It also proposes a mechanism that can select different points in the trade-off between payment proportionality and bandwidth guarantees. This mechanism is called Per Endpoint Sharing (PES). It's a mechanism for sharing cloud networks that allow one to explicitly trade between weight fidelity and guaranteed bandwidth. The main point of PES is to calculate a static weight for each source-destination pair by the following formula:

W(A, B) = W_A / N_A + W_B / N_B

where W_A is the weight VM A has annd N_A is the number of other VMs A is communicating with. Similar to B. But fundamental trade-off or problem here is this doesn't take care of the actual demand of communicating between A and another specific host. If the demand is small, it will not be able to adapt. This is also a common problem for all mechanisms that compute static weights.

Will this paper be influential in 10 years? Maybe, this paper identifies the fundamental trade-off between the ability to provide proportional network sharing based on payment and the ability to provide minimal bandwidth guarantees, it also proposes PES as a mechanism to achieve different design points in the trade-off between these conflicting requirements.