Today’s cloud-based online services are underpinned by distributed key-value stores (KVSs). Keys and values are distributed across back-end servers in such scale-out systems. One primary real-life performance bottleneck occurs when storage servers suffer from load imbalance under skewed workloads. In this paper, we present KVSwitch, a centralized self-managing load balancer that leverages the power and flexibility of emerging programmable switches. The balance is achieved by dynamically predicting the hot items an…