Middleboxes as a cloud service
Justine Sherry,
University of California at Berkeley –
Abstract:
Today’s networks do much more than merely deliver packets.
Through the deployment of middleboxes, enterprise networks today
provide improved security — e.g., filtering malicious content — and
performance capabilities — e.g., caching frequently accessed content.
Although middleboxes are deployed widely in enterprises, they bring
with them many challenges: they are complicated to manage, expensive,
prone to failures, and challenge privacy expectations.
In this talk, we aim to bring the benefits of cloud computing to
networking. We argue that middlebox services can be outsourced to
cloud providers in a similar fashion to how mail, compute, and storage
are today outsourced. We begin by presenting APLOMB, a system that
allows enterprises to outsource middlebox processing to a third party
cloud or ISP. For enterprise networks, APLOMB can reduce costs, ease
management, and provide resources for scalability and failover. For
service providers, APLOMB offers new customers and business
opportunities, but also presents new challenges. Middleboxes have
tighter performance demands than existing cloud services, and hence
supporting APLOMB requires redesigning software at the cloud. We
re-consider classical cloud challenges including fault-tolerance and
privacy, showing how to implement middlebox software solutions with
throughput and latency 2-4 orders of magnitude more efficient than
general-purpose cloud approaches. Some of the technologies discussed
in this talk are presently being adopted by industrial systems used by
cloud providers and ISPs.
Bio
Justine Sherry is a computer scientist and doctoral candidate at UC
Berkeley. Her interests are in computer networking; her work includes
middleboxes, networked systems, measurement, cloud computing, and
congestion control. Justine’s dissertation focuses on new
opportunities and challenges arising from the deployment of
middleboxes — such as firewalls and proxies — as services offered by
clouds and ISPs. Justine received her MS from UC Berkeley in 2012, and
her BS and BA from the University of Washington in 2010. She is an NSF
Graduate Research Fellow, has won paper awards from both USENIX NSDI
and ACM SIGCOMM, and is always on the lookout for a great cappuccino.
Date: 2016-Apr-28 Time: 14:00:00 Room: 336
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