Load Balancing Memcached Traffic Using Software Defined Networking

In this white paper, Associate Professor Anat Bremler-Barr and team present MBalancer: an efficient framework for solving Memcached’s hotkeys problem by efficiently load balancing its requests. MBalancer demonstrates the ability of switches and routers in SDN environment to solve problems that were traditionally done by middleboxes (in this case, load balancers and proxies). This solution does not require any change to the existing switch hardware and relies on very limited payload matching capabilities. MBalancer was implemented in a small SDN network, with a NoviFlow switch.