Personally I think one of the real usecase for smartnic is isolation: for a cloud provider, you can rent a bare metal instance and run all your networking security stack (think encapsulation, filtering, throttling etc) on the smartnic.
IOW the customer has full control of the host, but the cloud provider manages the smartnic. Incidentally, this is exactly what AWS does with their ENA adapters designed by... (ex-?)Anapurna Lab they bought some years ago (:
IOW the customer has full control of the host, but the cloud provider manages the smartnic. Incidentally, this is exactly what AWS does with their ENA adapters designed by... (ex-?)Anapurna Lab they bought some years ago (: