Offloading load balancers onto SmartNICs
Tianyi Cui, Wei Zhang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Arvind Krishnamurthy · 2021
Load balancers are pervasively used inside today's clouds to distribute network requests across data center servers at scale. While load balancers were initially built using dedicated and custom hardware, most cloud providers now use software-based load balancers. This allows the implementations to be more agile and also enables on-demand provisioning of load balancing workload on generic servers, but it comes with increased provisioning and operating costs.