Deployment Scalability in Exposed Buffer Processing

Abstract

Deployment scalability was introduced to capture a very general notion that is often a goal of shared infrastructure. It refers to the ability of the infrastructure’s basic service to grow across many boundaries that might constrain it, through the acceptable application of resources, and while maintaining it at a standard level. In order to achieve deployment scalability the Internet architecture created a common infrastructure interface, or “spanning layer,” at the Network layer of the communication stack. This architecture was adopted to achieve two central goals: 1) The spanning layer virtualizes the variety of local services, enabling interoperability through the adoption of a common model; and 2) it provides an abstraction that hides the complex and dynamic topology and behavior of local infrastructure, thereby restricting the ability of clients to inspect or control local resources. The central design choice of the Internet Architecture is to make end-to-end datagram delivery the “bearer service” that defines its spanning layer. By contrast, Exposed Buffer Processing creates a more general platform by defining an underlay platform that provides the resources for implementing networking, storage, and computation. Exposed Buffer Processing implements a) a low-level “data plane” that provides fundamental persistence, transfer, and processing functionality and b) a higher-level programmable “control plane” that defines a variety of more global services.