DiffForward: On Balancing Forwarding Traffic for Modern Cloud Block Services via Differentiated Forwarding

Modern cloud block service provides cloud users with virtual block disks (VDisks), and it usually relies on a forwarding layer consisting of multiple proxy servers to forward the block-level writes from applications to the underlying distributed storage. However, we discover that severe traffic imbalance exists among the proxy servers at the forwarding layer, thus creating a performance bottleneck which severely prolongs the latency of accessing VDisks. Worse yet, due to the diverse access patterns of VDisks, stable traffic and burst traffic coexist at the forwarding layer, and thus making existing load balancing designs inefficient for balancing the traffic at the forwarding layer of VDisks, as they are unaware of and also lack the ability to differentiate the decomposable burst and stable traffic. To this end, we propose a novel traffic forwarding scheme DiffForward for cloud block services. DiffForward differentiates the burst traffic from stable traffic in an accurate and efficient way at the client side, then it forwards the burst traffic to a decentralized distributed log store to realize real-time load balance by writing the data in a round-robin manner and balances the stable traffic by segmentation. DiffForward also judiciously coordinates the stable and burst traffic and preserves strong consistency under differentiated forwarding. Extensive experiments with reallife workloads on our prototype show that DiffForward effectively balances the traffic at the forwarding layer at a fine-grained subsecond level, thus significantly reducing the write latency of VDisks.