An NFV and microservice based architecture for on-the-fly component provisioning in content delivery networks

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) deliver content (e.g. Web pages, videos) to geographically distributed end-users over the Internet. Some contents do sometimes attract the attention of a large group of end-users. This often leads to flash crowds which can cause major issues such as outage in the CDN. Microservice architectural style aims at decomposing monolithic systems into smaller components which can be independently deployed, upgraded and disposed. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology that aims to reduce costs and bring agility by decoupling network functions from the underlying hardware. This paper leverages the NFV and microservice architectural style to propose an architecture for on-the-fly CDN component provisioning to tackle issues such as flash crowds. In the proposed architecture, CDN components are designed as sets of microservices which interact via RESTFul Web services and are provisioned as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), which are deployed and orchestrated on-the-fly. We have built a prototype in which a CDN surrogate server, designed as a set of microservices, is deployed on-the-fly. The prototype is deployed on SAVI, a Canadian distributed test bed for future Internet applications. The performance is also evaluated.