Network Performance Influences of Software-defined Networks on Micro-service Architectures

Modern business applications are increasingly developed as micro-services and deployed in the cloud. Due to many components involved micro-services need a flexible and high-performance network infrastructure. To ensure highly available and high performance applications, operators are increasingly relying on cloud service platforms such as the OpenShift Container Platform on Z. In such environments modern software-defined network technologies such as Open vSwitch (OVS) are used. However, the impact of their architecture on network performance has not yet been sufficiently researched although networking performance is particularly critical for the quality of the service. In this paper, we analyse the impact of the OVS pipeline and selected OVS operations in detail. We define different scenarios used in the industry and analyse the performance of different OVS configurations using an IBM z14 mainframe system. Our analysis showed the OVS pipeline and its operations can affect network performance by up to factor 3. Our results show that even the use of virtual switches such as OVS, network performance can be significantly improved by optimizing the OVS pipeline architecture.

[1]  Dejan S. Milojicic,et al.  Open Cirrus: A Global Cloud Computing Testbed , 2010, Computer.

[2]  Hongbo Wang,et al.  Open vSwitch Vxlan performance acceleration in cloud computing data center , 2016, 2016 5th International Conference on Computer Science and Network Technology (ICCSNT).

[3]  Yuthapong Somchit,et al.  Implementation of SDN Stateful Firewall on Data Plane using Open vSwitch , 2018, 2018 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE).

[4]  Sakir Sezer,et al.  Queen ' s University Belfast-Research Portal Are We Ready for SDN ? Implementation Challenges for Software-Defined Networks , 2016 .

[5]  Samuel Kounev,et al.  Automated Workload Characterization for I/O Performance Analysis in Virtualized Environments , 2015, Software Engineering.

[6]  Alexandru Iosup,et al.  Performance Analysis of Cloud Computing Services for Many-Tasks Scientific Computing , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[7]  Paul Rad,et al.  Low-latency software defined network for high performance clouds , 2015, 2015 10th System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE).

[8]  Quality-driven Reuse of Model-based Software Architecture Elements , 2019 .

[9]  Dejan S. Milojicic,et al.  HPC-Aware VM Placement in Infrastructure Clouds , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E).

[10]  Song Fu,et al.  Applying SDN based data network on HPC Big Data Computing – Design, Implementation, and Evaluation , 2019, 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data).

[11]  Min Chen,et al.  Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey , 2015, IEEE Access.

[12]  Adnan Noor Mian,et al.  Effects of Virtualization on Network and Processor Performance Using Open vSwitch and Xen Server , 2014, 2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing.

[13]  Xiaolin Chang,et al.  Performance Modeling of Linux Network System with Open vSwitch , 2020, Peer Peer Netw. Appl..

[14]  Ashraf Matrawy,et al.  An empirical model of packet processing delay of the Open vSwitch , 2017, 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[15]  Qi Hao,et al.  A Survey on Software-Defined Network and OpenFlow: From Concept to Implementation , 2014, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.