Earlier quoted context omitted.
*minority of the fangs.
A minority? What large tech company has not prioritized this?
Which have and with what?
It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
11–20 of 160 posts
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#12I wonder why Fibre Channel isn't used as a replacement for TCP in the datacenter. It is a very robust L3 protocol. It was designed to connect block storage devices to servers while making the OS think they are directly connected. OSs do NOT tolerate dropped data when reading and writing to block devices and so Fibre Channel has a extremely robust Token Bucket algorithm. The algo prevents congestion by allowing receivers to control how much data senders can send. I have worked with a lot of VMware clusters that use FC to connect servers to storage arrays and it has ALWAYS worked perfectly.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#13Unrelated to this article, are there any reasons to use TCP/IP over WebSockets? The latter is such a clean, message-based interface that I don't see a reason to use TCP/IP.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#14the problem with trying to replace TCP only inside DC, is because TCP will still be used outside DC.
Networking Engineering is already convoluted and troublesome as it is right now, using only tcp stack.
When you start using homa inside, but TCP from outside things will break, because a lot of DC requests are created as a response for an inbound request from outside DC (like a client trying to send RPC request).
I cannot imagine trying to troubleshoot hybrid problems at the intersection of tcp and homa, its gonna be a nightmare.
Plus I don't understand why create a a new L4 transport protocol for a specific L7 application (RPC)? This seems like a suboptimal choice, because RPC of today could be replaced with something completely different, like RDMA over Ethernet for AI workloads or transfer of large streams like training data/AI model state.
I think tuning TCP stack in the kernel, adding more configuration knobs for TCP, switching from stream(tcp) to packet (udp) protocols where it is warranted, will give more incremental benefits.
One major thing author missed is security applications, these are considered table stakes: 1. encryption in transit: handshake/negotiation 2. ability to intercept and do traffic inspection for enterprise security purposes 3. resistance to attacks like flood 4. security of sockets in containerized Linux environment
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#15For those who might not have noticed, the author is John Ousterhout- best known for TCL/Tk as well as the Raft consensus protocol among others.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#16Unrelated to this article, are there any reasons to use TCP/IP over WebSockets? The latter is such a clean, message-based interface that I don't see a reason to use TCP/IP.
Websockets is a layer on top of TCP/IP.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#17Unrelated to this article, are there any reasons to use TCP/IP over WebSockets? The latter is such a clean, message-based interface that I don't see a reason to use TCP/IP.
Well, Websocket is over TCP, so you already need it for that.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#18> If Homa becomes widely deployed, I hypothesize that core congestion will cease to exist as a significant networking problem, as long as the core is not systemically overloaded. Yep. Sure; but, what happens when it becomes overloaded? > Homa manages congestion from the receiver, not the sender. [...] but the remaining scheduled packets may only be sent in response to grants from the receiver I hypothesize it will no…
Will it be a worse day than it would be with TCP? Either way, the only solution is to add more hardware, unless I'm misunderstanding the term "systemically overloaded".
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#19TCP was replaced in the data centers of certain FAANG companies years before this paper.
Curious ... replaced with what, I would like to know.
Re: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)
#20How long did we need to support ipv6? Is it supported yet and more widely in use than the ipv4, like in mobile networks where everything is stashed behind NAT and ipv4 kept?
Another protocol, something completely new? Good luck with that, i would rather bet on global warming to put us out of our misery (/s)...
