Multitenancy for Fast and Programmable Networks in the Cloud

Fast and programmable network devices are now readily available, both in the form of programmable switches and smart network-interface cards. Going forward, we envision that these devices will be widely deployed in the networks of cloud providers (eg, AWS, Azure, and GCP) and exposed as a programmable surface for cloud customers—similar to how cloud customers can today rent CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ML accelerators. Making this vision a reality requires us to develop a mechanism to share the resources of a programmable network device across multiple cloud tenants. In other words, we need to provide multitenancy on these devices. In this position paper, we design compile and run-time approaches to multitenancy. We present preliminary results showing that our design provides both efficient resource utilization and isolation of tenant programs from each other.