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Cloud applications are increasingly relying on hundreds of loosely-coupled microservices to complete user requests that meetan application’s end-to-end QoS requirements. Communication time between services accounts for a large fraction of the end-to-endlatency and can introduce performance unpredictability and QoS violations. This work presents our early work onDagger, a hardwareacceleration platform for networking, designed specifically with the unique qualities of microservices in mind. The Dagger architecturerelies on an FPGA-based NIC, closely coupled with the processor over a configurable memory interconnect, designed to offload andaccelerate RPC stacks. Unlike the traditional cloud systems that use PCIe links as the NIC I/O interface, we leverage memory-interconnectedFPGAs as networking devices to provide the efficiency, transparency, and programmability needed for fine-grained microservices. We showthat this considerably improves CPU utilization and performance for cloud RPCs.