1. Flurries: Countless Fine-Grained NFs for Flexiable per-flow Customization
Wei Zhang, Jinho Hwang, Shriram Rajagopal, k.k. ramakrishnan and timothy wood – conext 2016

2. From: Class Wide Monolithic NFs To: Light-Weight Flow Specific NFs
Dedicated Core
NF's on containers share other cores
0-copy by shared memory – no full isolation
DPDK: NIC <-> RX\TX
RX --> Flow Table --> NF #i Rx
RX --> Flow Director --> Controller --> allocate NF
Costly statistics gathering for fine-grained scheduling.

3. Per-Flow NF's & NF's state transation
NF's life-time is as long as the flow is active.
NF's are woke up By Wakeup thread and not by every packet arrival (threshold / timeout).
When flow finishes, the NF resets its state and is moved to the idle pool.
NF's containers should use the libflurries API.
No dynamic idle pool resizing feature.

4. 80,000/s Flurry NFs, 30 Gbps
28 core Intel Xeon 2.6 GHz. 3 Dual Port NIC’s (10G). 164 GB Memory.

5. Chain-aware scheduling
Overloaded system.
Chain 1:3:7.
Drop as early as possible in the chain.
Unaware => same priority => NF1 hogs the cpu
Flurries => later NF’s have higher priority