Memtrade: A Disaggregated-Memory Marketplace for Public Clouds

We present Memtrade, the first memory disaggregation system for public clouds. Public clouds introduce a set of unique challenges for resource disaggregation across different tenants, including security, isolation and pricing. Memtrade allows producer virtual machines (VMs) to lease both their unallocated memory and allocated-but-idle application memory to remote consumer VMs for a limited period of time. Memtrade does not require any modifications to host-level system software or support from the cloud provider. It harvests producer memory using an application-aware control loop to form a distributed transient remote memory pool with minimal performance impact; it employs a broker to match producers with consumers while satisfying performance constraints; and it exposes the matched memory to consumers as a secure KV cache. Our evaluation using realworld cluster traces shows that Memtrade provides significant performance benefit for consumers (improving average read latency up to 2.8×) while preserving confidentiality and integrity, with little impact on producer applications (degrading performance by less than 2.1%).