Many enterprises use the cloud to host applications such as Web services, big data analytics, and storage, which involve significant I/O activities, moving data from a source to a sink, often without even any intermediate processing; however, cloud environments tend to be virtualized, which introduces a significant overhead for I/O activity as data needs to be moved across several protection boundaries. CPU sharing among virtual machines (VMs) introduces further delays into the overall I/O processing data flow. In this article, we present an abstraction called vPipe to mitigate these problems. vPipe introduces a simple “pipe” that can connect data sources and sinks, which can be either files or TCP sockets, at the virtual machine monitor (VMM) layer. Shortcutting the I/O at the VMM layer achieves significant CPU savings and avoids scheduling latencies that degrade I/O throughput.
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