Empowering Azure Storage with RDMA

Explore a 20-minute conference talk from USENIX NSDI '23 detailing Microsoft's implementation of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) in Azure Storage. Discover how RDMA has been deployed at a regional scale to support both frontend and backend storage traffic, addressing challenges such as interoperability between different RDMA network interface cards. Learn about the significant improvements in disk I/O performance and CPU core savings achieved through this implementation, with RDMA now accounting for approximately 70% of Azure's traffic across all public regions. Gain insights into the complexities of enabling high-performance, reliable cloud storage services in disaggregated environments and the innovative solutions developed by Microsoft's team to overcome these obstacles.