SmartGate: Accelerate Cloud Gateway with SmartNIC
Wei Yang, Chenming Chang · 2023
With the development of cloud computing, more and more enterprises and organizations are migrating their businesses to the cloud for resource sharing, cost reduction, and improved operational efficiency. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is an important service model in cloud computing, providing users with virtualized computing, storage, and network resources. Cloud gateway, a key component of IaaS architecture, performs various functions such as traffic management, load balancing, and security protection. This paper presents SmartGate, a cloud gateway based on SmartNIC that leverages offloading capabilities to overcome the performance bottleneck of traditional software-based solutions. SmartGate enhances the network traffic processing model for SmartNIC and designs the lifecycle of offloading flow rules to improve the coordination efficiency between hardware and software. Our evaluation shows that SmartGate can reduces the latency by ∼76.1% and achieves a nearly 4x increase in energy efficiency.