Pegasus: Transparent and Unified Kernel-Bypass Networking for Fast Local and Remote Communication

Modern software architectures in cloud computing are highly reliant on interconnected local and remote services. Popular architectures, such as the service mesh, rely on the use of independent services or sidecars for a single application. While such modular approaches simplify application development and deployment, they also introduce significant communication overhead since now even local communication that is handled by the kernel becomes a performance bottleneck. This problem has been identified and partially solved for remote communication over fast NICs through the use of kernel-bypass data plane systems. However, existing kernel-bypass mechanisms challenge their practical deployment by either requiring code modification or supporting only a small subset of the network interface.