Modern interactive and data-intensive applications must operate under demanding time constraints, prompting a shift toward the adoption of specialized software and hardware network acceleration technologies. This specialization, however, poses significant scalability, flexibility, security, and economic sustainability challenges for application developers. Cloud computing holds the potential to overcome these obstacles by offering the cost-effective option to access specialized acceleration technologies through standard cloud interfaces. Nevertheless, that integration is still challenging for cloud providers. In the cloud, physical resources are hidden behind a virtualization layer, whereas acceleration technologies make applications directly interact with the hardware. To bridge this gap, recent literature explores the possibility of empowering cloud platforms with accelerated networking as a commodity, thus offering the innovative option of Network Acceleration as a Service. This survey reviews these recent research efforts by adopting popular technologies like XDP, DPDK, and RDMA as a reference. To organize the surveyed research in a comprehensive framework, we identify four key aspects that pose critical problems to the integration of acceleration options in cloud computing -access interfaces, virtualization techniques, serviceability, and security -and systematically discuss the associated challenges. Then, we present the issues to be further addressed and outline the most promising research directions for the full integration of network acceleration within next-generation cloud computing platforms.

中文翻译：

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通过网络加速增强云计算能力：一项调查


现代交互式和数据密集型应用程序必须在严格的时间限制下运行，从而促使人们转向采用专门的软件和硬件网络加速技术。然而，这种专业化给应用程序开发人员带来了巨大的可扩展性、灵活性、安全性和经济可持续性挑战。云计算有潜力克服这些障碍，提供通过标准云接口访问专用加速技术的经济高效的选项。尽管如此，这种集成对于云提供商来说仍然具有挑战性。在云中，物理资源隐藏在虚拟化层后面，而加速技术使应用程序直接与硬件交互。为了弥补这一差距，最近的文献探讨了为云平台提供加速网络作为商品的可能性，从而提供网络加速即服务的创新选择。本次调查以XDP、DPDK、RDMA等流行技术为参考，回顾了最近的研究成果。为了将调查研究组织在一个全面的框架中，我们确定了对云计算中的加速选项集成提出关键问题的四个关键方面——访问接口、虚拟化技术、可服务性和安全性——并系统地讨论了相关的挑战。然后，我们提出了需要进一步解决的问题，并概述了在下一代云计算平台中全面集成网络加速的最有前途的研究方向。