Performance Interfaces for Network Functions

Semantic interfaces (e.g. abstract classes, specifications, header files, documentation) succinctly describe a program's externally visible functional behavior, enabling engineers to use the system productively.
There is no equivalent construct for describing performance behavior in a way that is simultaneously succinct, precise, complete, and human-readable. Engineers deploy and reason about systems without understanding the entire spectrum of performance it can exhibit. This can lead to unexpected performance behavior and a perpetual need to fix performance bugs.

The main idea is to provide a performance interface that describe system's performance behavior and is simultaneously succinct, precise, complete, and human-readable. It leverages the notion of performance resolution and deployment-specific interfaces to enable abstraction of performance behavior.
This is represented as a "program", which take input same as the system, and output how long the system would take to process the given input. It has a resolution that quantifies the smallest change in performance that it specifies.
The paper presents their proposal in the context of network functions (NFs), and developed PIX (Performance Interface Extractor) that takes input NF code and output general-case performance interface in the form of small python program that it can specialize into deployment-specific interfaces for individual deployments.

Last updated 1 year ago