About Microservices, Containers and their Underestimated Impact on Network Performance

About Microservices, Containers and

their Underestimated Impact on

Network Performance

Nane Kratzke

1Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems

The next 20 to 25 minutes are about ...

• Avoiding Vendor Lock-in in Cloud Computing

• Microservices, Containers and Container Clusters (like

Mesos, Kubernetes, etc.)

• Technical and performance impacts of above mentioned

approaches

• Minimizing these impacts on application, overlay

network and infrastructure layer

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems2

Where do we come from ...

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems3

• Research about avoiding Cloud Vendor Lock-in

• Small and medium sized companies

• Analyzing public, private IaaS infrastructures

• Analyzing container technologies like Docker

• Container clusters might be the answer

Container Clusters

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems4

or similar container

technologies

But you need similar machines ...Is that possible across different providers?

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems5

These instances show same similarity values and could be used for

cross-provider container clusters deployed to AWS and GCE.

Some further Myths

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems6

Containers are lightweight (says Docker and IBM)

Software defined networking provides flexibility at reasonable

performance impacts (hopefully, but we need it anyway)

Encryption must be a performance killer (otherwise everybody

would encrypt)

Microservices

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems7

„The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a

single application as a suite of small services, each running in its

own process and communicating with lightweight mechnisms, often

an HTTP resource API.“

Martin Fowler

Reference Experiment

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems8

Experiment to measure reference network performance of REST-like

HTTP-based communication protocols.

Done with Amazon Web Services (region eu-west-1).

All hosts m3.medium (1 core).

Impact of Containers

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems9

Experiment to measure container impact on network performance of

REST-like HTTP-based communication protocols.

All hosts m3.medium (1 core).

Impact of Software Defined Networks

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems10

Experiment to measure additional SDVN impact on network

performance of REST-like HTTP-based communication protocols.

All hosts m3.medium (1 core).

SDVN solution: weave docker network

Impact of Encryption

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems11

Experiment to measure additional encryption impact on network

performance of REST-like HTTP-based communication protocols.

All hosts m3.medium (1 core).

SDVN solution: weave docker network

Impact to Transfer Rates

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems12

Cross Regional Experiment

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems13

Just to get a better

„feeling“ ...

Where to loose ...

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems14

Loss caused by containers

Loss caused by SDN

Loss caused by encryption

Finally, measured losses are caused by ...

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems15

Conclusion

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems16

Application layer:

Overlay network layer:

Infrastructure layer:

• Reduce message sizes

• Reduce messages

• Smaller messages, smaller problems

• Less messages, less problems

• Encryption for small messages is almost for free

• Do not containerize SDN routers

• Deploy SDN routers directly on the host

• Avoids Container losses of about 10% – 20%

• Use multi core hosts

• To minimize CPU contention of SDN router

processes with application processes

• Plan 1 core for the network!

but have performance implications in mind ...

Acknowledgement

• Stormy sailing: Free Aussie Stock,

http://freeaussiestock.com/free/Queensland/mission_be

ach/slides/mission_beach_sailing.htm

• Stonehenge: Wikipedia,

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge

• Microservices: Robert Morschel, http://www.soa-

probe.com/2015/03/microservices-summary.html

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems17

This study was funded by German Federal Ministry of Education

and Research (Project Cloud TRANSIT, 03FH021PX4). The

author thanks Lübeck University (Institute of Telematics) and fat

IT solution GmbH (Kiel) for their support of Cloud TRANSIT. The

author also thanks Bryan Boreham of zett.io for checking our data

of zett.io’s weave solution (which might show now better results

than the analyzed first version of weave).

Picture Reference

About

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nane Kratzke

Computer Science and Business Information Systems18

Nane Kratzke

CoSA: http://cosa.fh-luebeck.de/en/contact/people/kratzke

Blog: http://www.nkode.io

Twitter: @NaneKratzke

GooglePlus: +NaneKratzke

LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/nanekratzke

GitHub: https://github.com/nkratzke

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nane_Kratzke

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