Performance considerations of network functions virtualization using containers

Anderson, Jason; Hu, Hongxin; Agarwal, Udit; Lowery, Craig; Li, Hongda; Apon, Amy

doi:10.1109/iccnc.2016.7440668

Cited by 47 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Because AF_GRAFT is an enhancement on the socket layer, applications that are sensitive to networks do not work with AF_GRAFT. For example, AF_GRAFT cannot be applied to container-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [12,20,37]. In container-based NFV, virtual network functions packaged in containers process and deliver packets using low-level packet I/O mechanisms such as virtual interfaces or high-speed packet I/O.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grafting sockets for fast container networking

Nakamura

Sekiya

Tazaki

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems

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This paper proposes a novel approach for fast container networking that enables applications in containers to utilize host network stacks directly with proper access control. Our approach, called socket-grafting, offers a new socketlayer communication channel by grafting sockets in containers onto sockets in host network stacks. In contrast to recent approaches that make network stacks faster by using high-speed packet I/O techniques, socket-grafting makes container networking faster by bypassing a container's network stack and virtual interfaces. As a concrete implementation of socket-grafting, we designed AF_GRAFT, which is a new address family for the socket layer. AF_GRAFT performs interconnection between the two socket layers in the container and host network stacks. In this paper, we describe socket-grafting, AF_GRAFT design, and its implementation on Linux. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed method doubled throughput and reduced latency by 23% compared with traditional NAT-based container networking, and improved the network performance of containerized HTTP servers and message queues. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Cloud computing; • Software and its engineering → Communications management; KEYWORDS container networking, network stack, socket API ACM Reference Format: (a) Throughput (b) Latency Figure 1: Performance comparison of a native host and a container with the docker default networking.

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Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grafting sockets for fast container networking

Nakamura

Sekiya

Tazaki

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems

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“…Container‐based virtualization is an alternative to hypervisors where the virtualization layer runs as an application of the local operating system level . Since applications in containers run directly on the operating system and do not use hardware indirections, they should be more efficient than their VM‐based counterparts and allow higher application density on the same host . The comparison is made between a traditional VM running on the Virtualbox hypervisor and a container running on the Docker platform.…”

Section: Experimental Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In one of their latest documents, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) describes the deployment of VNFs using containers . Containers are a relatively new technology that allow the execution applications as sandboxed instances on the host machine . Container‐based virtualization is a potential alternative to hypervisors because they can share the same kernel of the host system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 Containers are a relatively new technology that allow the execution applications as sandboxed instances on the host machine. 13 Container-based virtualization is a potential alternative to hypervisors because they can share the same kernel of the host system. Containers are much simpler than hypervisors; a hypervisor partitions the resources of a single host and creates VMs isolated from each other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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NFV‐FD: Implementation of a failure detector using network virtualization technology

Turchetti

Duarte

2017

Int J Network Mgmt

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Summary A failure detector (FD) is a classic distributed systems service that can be used to monitor processes of any network application. Failure detectors provide process state information: A process is reported to be either correct or suspected to have crashed. In this work, we propose the implementation of a process monitoring service using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in an OpenFlow network. The NFV is a technology that uses software virtualization techniques to drastically reduce the cost of deploying and managing network functions that are usually available as middleboxes. We describe NFV‐FD, a network service that provides information about the state of both processes and links. The NFV‐FD relies on an OpenFlow controller from which monitoring information is obtained. We investigate different ways to implement NFV‐FD. We evaluate the performance impact of monitoring by implementing the virtual function both within and on a separate host from the controller. Then we compare an implementation based on a traditional virtual machine with another implementation based on containers. Experimental results are reported not only in terms of performance, ie, the amount of resources required by NFV‐FD, but also for the quality of service provided by the failure detection and notification functions as they are used to deploy a reliable broadcast service.

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“…Cziva and Pezaros [7] also propose a concrete application of GLANF to the network edge, exploiting lightweight container-based network functions that can run on a variety of edge devices. Anderson et al [8] investigate performance of container-based network functions, addressing Docker as a promising technology to enhance efficiency and deployment time of NFV environments. The authors also stress the potential of Docker in terms of packaging specification, as a means to standardise the vNSF format and to ease its distribution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Container-based design of a Virtual Network Security Function

Benedictis

Lioy

Smiraglia

2018

2018 4th IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization and Workshops (NetSoft)

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Modern ICT infrastructures are evolving thanks to the advantages offered by virtualisation in terms of flexibility, scalability, and savings on hardware-related costs. More recently, virtualisation has gained momentum in the Internet Service Providers' infrastructures as well, where Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation paradigms propose programmability of the network and the softwarisation of proprietary hardware appliances. In this scenario, lightweight virtualisation technologies, such as Linux containers, have a significant role, as they address the needs for scalability, availability and fast deployment to support the software-based network infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on defining a reusable design for a container-based Virtual Network Security Function, by highlighting the peculiarities of its architecture compared to a Virtual Machine-based instance. Moreover, we present a prototype application of this architecture to implement an HTTP reverse proxy with application-layer filtering capabilities, tailored for the NFV Security-as-a-Service scenario. We evaluate the performance of this prototype and compare it to the results of alternative deployments, namely the Virtual Machine and bare-metal solutions. Finally, we evaluate the proposed solution in a load-balancing scenario, for increased throughput and availability.

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Performance considerations of network functions virtualization using containers

Cited by 47 publications

References 19 publications

Grafting sockets for fast container networking

Grafting sockets for fast container networking

NFV‐FD: Implementation of a failure detector using network virtualization technology

Container-based design of a Virtual Network Security Function

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