Today’s cloud-based services integrate globally distributed resources into seamless computing platforms. Provisioning and accounting for the resource usage of these Internet-scale applications presents a challenging technical problem. We have designed and implemented distributed rate limiters, which work together to enforce a global rate limit across traffic aggregates at multiple sites, enabling the coordinated policing of a cloud-based service’s network traffic. Our abstraction not only enforces a global limit, but also ensures that congestion-responsive transport-layer flows behave as if they traversed a single, shared limiter. One of our designs is scalable to hundreds of nodes while being robust to loss and communication delay, making it practical for deployment in nationwide service providers.
A key component of this work has been a robust implementation that can be used in real-world systems. We have recently, working with Planetlab, introduced the code at multiple sites.
Click here to see graphs of DRL in use at 4 PL sites around the globe.