Dagger: Efficient and Fast RPCs for Cloud Microservices with Near-Memory Reconfigurable NICs Extended Abstract

The shift of cloud services from monolithic applications to microservices and the increasing interest in interactive applications with strict latency constraints, are changing the requirements of datacenter networks. Typical microservices are not computationally intense and very short; in the order of a few hundred millisecond to a few seconds [12, 24], therefore a substantial fraction of their latency comes from networking. Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) are one of the most common communication primitives in microservices. Unfortunately, commercially-available RPC frameworks, such as Apache Thrift [3], gRPC [2], Finagle [1] are all based on commodity networking systems, like the Linux kernel stack, which introduce considerably overheads when it comes to microservices [14, 22, 24]. Reducing these overheads and improving the overall performance of cloud networking is one of the key challenges towards enabling more widespread adoption of interactive microservices.