The Two Sides of Containers: Exploring the Balance Between Isolation and Performance of Virtualized Network Functions

• Nicolas Silveira Kagami UFRGS
• Luciano Paschoal Gaspary UFRGS

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wperformance.2017.3349

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been suggested as a solution to the telecommunications industry’s dependence on deploying dedicated physical devices to provide new functionality. Before NFV is widely adopted by the industry, it is essential that its robustness and performance aren’t far from what is observed in traditional middlebox solutions. The use of containers has been recently studied as a lightweight alternative to the vastly employed hardware virtualization. However, most studies don’t examine the effect of exerting isolation in the performance of containers. This factor can be decisive and should not be overlooked, specially considering that implementing isolation is a more intricate endeavour in containers than in hardware virtualization. This paper aims to characterize the trade-off relationship between isolation and performance in container based NFV environments, exploring technologies regarding isolation, communication, network functions and anomalies.

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