Key Highlights
- Alibaba ZooRoute cuts outage times by 92% through rapid failure recovery.
- Hermes improves load balancing efficiency, lowering operational costs by nearly 19%.
- Nezha SmartNIC optimizes hardware usage, reducing bottlenecks without requiring new infrastructure.
Network failures, uneven load balancing, and underutilized infrastructure remain pressing issues for global cloud providers. With cloud computing serving as the backbone for businesses, consumer apps, and critical operations, outages and inefficiencies directly impact customer trust and operational expenses.
To address these concerns, Alibaba Cloud Research has introduced three pioneering systems—ZooRoute, Hermes, and Nezha—set to be presented at the SIGCOMM conference. Each solution targets a different challenge in large-scale networking with the common goal of reducing costs, improving reliability, and optimizing performance.
ZooRoute – Faster Recovery from Network Failures
Alibaba ZooRoute is a next-generation failure recovery service designed to keep hyperscale cloud networks running even during outages. Unlike traditional traffic engineering solutions that may take several seconds to react, ZooRoute continuously probes for backup paths in real time.
In production deployment, ZooRoute demonstrated remarkable efficiency, reducing cloud network outages by more than 92%. This ensures minimal disruption for end users while significantly lowering the cost of maintaining backup systems.
Hermes: Smarter, More Efficient Load Balancing
Layer 7 load balancers are vital for distributing millions of requests across servers in large cloud environments. Traditional Linux-based load balancers, while stable, often struggle with uneven workloads.
Hermes introduces an eBPF-powered scheduling mechanism that filters and prioritizes traffic at the kernel level. Results include:
- 90% reduction in CPU imbalances
- 99% fewer uneven connections
- Nearly 100% elimination of worker “hangs”
By improving workload distribution, Hermes has cut operating costs by nearly 19% while ensuring smoother application performance for tenants.
Nezha: Optimizing SmartNIC Utilization
Nezha SmartNIC technology addresses uneven workloads across network interface cards with built-in processors. In many cloud data centers, some SmartNICs are overburdened while others remain idle, leading to inefficiencies.
Nezha continuously monitors workloads and redistributes them dynamically across SmartNICs. Additionally, it shifts select functions from virtual switches to the VM kernel stack, streamlining operations without the need for new hardware.
This approach boosts performance while reducing bottlenecks—an advancement that reflects the growing role of Alibaba Cloud research in practical, cost-efficient innovation.
Why This Matters for Cloud Providers?
Together, ZooRoute, Hermes, and Nezha highlight how software-driven innovation is redefining cloud infrastructure management. For global providers, these solutions deliver clear benefits:
- Improved reliability through reduced cloud network outages
- Lower operational costs from smarter load balancing
- Extended hardware lifecycles via Nezha SmartNIC optimization
As the adoption of cloud computing accelerates, Alibaba’s advancements signal a shift toward intelligent, software-centric infrastructure strategies designed to maximize both reliability and efficiency.