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Unikernels Everywhere: The Case for Elastic CDNs

Published:08 April 2017Publication History
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Abstract

Video streaming dominates the Internet's overall traffic mix, with reports stating that it will constitute 90% of all consumer traffic by 2019. Most of this video is delivered by Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and, while they optimize QoE metrics such as buffering ratio and start-up time, no single CDN provides optimal performance. In this paper we make the case for elastic CDNs, the ability to build virtual CDNs on-the-fly on top of shared, third-party infrastructure at a scale. To bring this idea closer to reality we begin by large-scale simulations to quantify the effects that elastic CDNs would have if deployed, and build and evaluate MiniCache, a specialized, minimalistic virtualized content cache that runs on the Xen hypervisor. MiniCache is able to serve content at rates of up to 32 Gb/s and handle up to 600K reqs/sec on a single CPU core, as well as boot in about 90 milliseconds on x86 and around 370 milliseconds on ARM32.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 52, Issue 7
    VEE '17
    July 2017
    256 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/3140607
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      VEE '17: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments
      April 2017
      261 pages
      ISBN:9781450349482
      DOI:10.1145/3050748

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    • Published: 8 April 2017

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