Title: Can my load-balancer choose the path and should I be worried about it?
Speaker: Nikhil Handigol (Stanford Univ.)
Abstract:
Load-balancing has become a commonly used element of all scale-out network services. Many commercial load-balancing products have been built that sit on the path of incoming requests and spread them over a set of servers. First, I will talk about how, with emerging trends in networking technology, load-balancing can be achieved in a cheaper and more flexible fashion. Our work is premised on the following observation: load-balancing is essentially congestion-aware routing. I will describe Aster*x, a prototype distributed load-balancer. While today's load-balancers can pick a server, they are not free to choose a good path to the server, placing them at the mercy of the network to choose the path for them. We will explore how much better would an ideal load-balancer, that could also choose the path, be. I will discuss some of our surprising observations.
Bio:
Nikhil Handigol is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He graduated in 2008 from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India with a B. Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering. He is broadly interested in the area of systems and networking. His research at Stanford focuses on SDN/OpenFlow and architecture of the future Internet.