arXiv subjects

Laurin Brandner

Publications and source records attributed to Laurin Brandner.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Enforcing Application-Layer Policies in eBPF

Service meshes have recently emerged as the de-facto standard for deploying microservices. Conceptually, they provide a uniform abstraction for inter-process communication (IPC) between services by implementing common networking mechanisms---such as encryption, routing, and load balancing---and by allowing these mechanisms to be configured and composed through high-level policies. Supporting these policies, however, comes with a significant performance cost, since service meshes interpose proxies (``sidecars'') on the data path between every service. This paper presents Beeline, a fast path for service meshes which can enforce the vast majority of application-layer policies seen in the wild directly in kernel space. Given high-level policies, Beeline automatically synthesizes an eBPF-based data plane which enforces them in the kernel. Beeline accelerates existing microservices without any code modification, and transparently falls back to existing service proxies (the slow path) for the few unsupported policies. We fully implemented Beeline, with support for both TLS and HTTP/2. Compared to state-of-the-art service meshes, Beeline reduces the median request latency of realistic applications by up to $6\times$ while sustaining $3\times$ more throughput.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

SeBS-Flow: Benchmarking Serverless Cloud Function Workflows

Serverless computing has emerged as a prominent paradigm, with a significant adoption rate among cloud customers. While this model offers advantages such as abstraction from the deployment and resource scheduling, it also poses limitations in handling complex use cases due to the restricted nature of individual functions. Serverless workflows address this limitation by orchestrating multiple functions into a cohesive application. However, existing serverless workflow platforms exhibit significant differences in their programming models and infrastructure, making fair and consistent performance evaluations difficult in practice. To address this gap, we propose the first serverless workflow benchmarking suite SeBS-Flow, providing a platform-agnostic workflow model that enables consistent benchmarking across various platforms. SeBS-Flow includes six real-world application benchmarks and four microbenchmarks representing different computational patterns. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on three major cloud platforms, assessing performance, cost, scalability, and runtime deviations. We make our benchmark suite open-source, enabling rigorous and comparable evaluations of serverless workflows over time.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

A Fast Analytical Model of Fully Associative Caches

While the cost of computation is an easy to understand local property, the cost of data movement on cached architectures depends on global state, does not compose, and is hard to predict. As a result, programmers often fail to consider the cost of data movement. Existing cache models and simulators provide the missing information but are computationally expensive. We present a lightweight cache model for fully associative caches with least recently used (LRU) replacement policy that gives fast and accurate results. We count the cache misses without explicit enumeration of all memory accesses by using symbolic counting techniques twice: 1) to derive the stack distance for each memory access and 2) to count the memory accesses with stack distance larger than the cache size. While this technique seems infeasible in theory, due to non-linearities after the first round of counting, we show that the counting problems are sufficiently linear in practice. Our cache model often computes the results within seconds and contrary to simulation the execution time is mostly problem size independent. Our evaluation measures modeling errors below 0.6% on real hardware. By providing accurate data placement information we enable memory hierarchy aware software development.

cs.PF↗