The Research Behind Stateless : Breaking the Tight Couple of State and Processing

Stateless is the culmination of research completed by Murad Kablan (Stateless CEO) and Eric Keller (Stateless CTO). The document was presented at NSDI in 2017.

If you are interested in learning more about the revolutionary architecture behind Stateless, you can read the full paper. The paper's abstract is included below to summarize the findings at a high-level. 

Abstract
In this paper we present Stateless Network Functions, a new architecture for network functions virtualization, where we decouple the existing design of network functions into a stateless processing component along with a data store layer. In breaking the tight coupling, we enable a more elastic and resilient network function infrastructure. Our StatelessNF processing instances are architected around efficient pipelines utilizing DPDK for high performance network I/O, packaged as Docker containers for easy deployment, and a data store interface optimized based on the expected request patterns to efficiently access a RAMCloud-based data store. A network-wide orchestrator monitors the instances for load and failure, manages instances to scale and provide resilience, and leverages an OpenFlow-based network to direct traffic to instances. We implemented three example network functions (network address translator, firewall, and load balancer). Our evaluation shows (i) we are able to reach a throughput of 10Gbit/sec, with an added latency overhead of between 100µs and 500µs, (ii) we are able to have a failover which does not disrupt ongoing traffic, and (iii) when scaling out and scaling in we are able to match the ideal performance.