Rethinking RPC Communication for Microservices-based Applications
Xiangfeng Zhu, Yang Zhou, Yuyao Wang, Xiangyu Gao, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Sam Kumar, Ratul Mahajan, Danyang Zhuo · 2025
Fast and efficient RPCs are key to the performance of applications based on microservices. But RPC communication suffers from significant overhead today because it relies on the standard, layered protocol stack and loose coupling between the end host and in-network proxies that process RPCs. We propose delayering the RPC communication stack and tightly coupling the end host and in-network processing using high-level abstractions. This approach leads to more efficient and performant RPC communication because it eliminates many sources of overhead.