Towards Fine-Grained Billing For Cloud Networking
This addresses billing inefficiencies for cloud providers and tenants, but it is incremental as it builds on existing serverless billing concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-tenant network virtualization in data centers by proposing tenant-specific virtual switches to enable fine-grained billing for network resources, such as IO, CPU, or energy, and identifies that current virtual switches lack sufficient multi-tenancy and create performance bottlenecks.
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.