L7LB: High Performance Layer-7 Load Balancing on Heterogeneous Programmable Platforms

Xiaoyi Shi, Yifan Li, Chengjun Jia, Xiaohe Hu, Jun Li

Abstract: Layer-7 load balancing is an essential pillar in modern enterprise infrastructure. It is inefficient to scale software layer-7 load balancing which requires hundreds of servers to meet the large-scale service requirements of 1 Tbps throughput and 1M concurrent requests. This paper presents L7LB with a novel fast path and slow path co-design architecture running on a heterogeneous programmable server-switch. L7LB is efficient by offloading most packets' forwarding onto the Tbps bandwidth switch chip, with few CPU cores processing application connections. The preliminary prototype demonstrates the layer-7 load balancing functionality and shows that L7LB can meet the large-scale service requirements.