[baybal2]

About to congratulate you that you are about to make competition to Alibaba.com.

On our side, maxing the IOPS was the easy part. The hard one was to marry the protocol with converged/deterministic Ethernet with RDMA. We were split in between "one request, one frame/packet burst" vs "all requests are somehow smartly aligned with frames by stateful logic." The first one was surprisingly susceptible to performance artifacts due to varying round trip latency of few microseconds, thus it was possible to get packets in transit being dropped due to receiving NIC (a top tier hardware) being momentarily overloaded.

You have an advantage of being DC provider independent, and can jump the AWS ship whenever you want. Alibaba's solution will be tied to its infrastructure with its very expensive RDMA capable network.

[andrewcanis]

Sounds interesting, are there any papers or public details that you could point me to with more technical information about this Alibaba RDMA-based memcached project? Alibaba also has FPGA instances available and we have been investigating their cloud offering.

[baybal2]

Invite only till at least autumn, and they have no English speaking support (it is for their Chinese only DCs.)

Google Alibaba China F1 or F2.

As for the offering, the idea is that end the clients will only have to deal with SDK and libs on instances, not raw RDMA or anything related to internal infrastructure. This is how much I am allowed to say besides the fact of its existence.

From their current experience, and that of other hosting providers, not many people who go with F1, F2, or other FPGA instance actually do reap any benefit, and some drop mid-way. That's why they want to get more people using them pass the "toying with it stage." The "Herokuification" (god, Heroku sounds beyond hilarious in Russian) is there to let people use the common APIs while getting benefit from FPGA performance, without dealing with things outside of average webdev area of expertise.