Towards Fine-Grained Billing For Cloud Networking

TL;DR

This paper advocates for tenant-specific virtual switches in data center networks to enable fine-grained billing for network resources, addressing current limitations in multi-tenancy and performance bottlenecks.

Contribution

It proposes a new architecture for tenant-specific virtual switches that enhances multi-tenancy and supports detailed billing for network, CPU, and energy usage.

Findings

Current virtual switches lack sufficient multi-tenancy.

Existing switches can create artificial performance bottlenecks.

Tenant-specific switches enable more precise resource accounting.

Abstract

We revisit multi-tenant network virtualization in data centers, and make the case for tenant-specific virtual switches. In particular, tenant-specific virtual switches allow cloud providers to extend fine-grained billing (known, e.g., from serverless architectures) to the network, accounting not only for IO, but also CPU or energy. We sketch an architecture and present economical motivation and recent technological enablers. We also find that virtual switches today do not offer sufficient multi-tenancy and can introduce artificial performance bottlenecks, e.g., in load balancers. We conclude by discussing additional use cases for tentant-specific switches.