Towards "full containerization" in containerized network function virtualization

Abstract

With exploding traffic stuffing existing network infra-structure, today's telecommunication and cloud service providers resort to Network Function Virtualization (NFV) for greater agility and economics. Pioneer service provider such as AT&T proposes to adopt container in NFV to achieve shorter Virtualized Network Function (VNF) provisioning time and better runtime performance. However, we characterize typical NFV work-loads on the containers and find that the performance is unsatisfactory. We observe that the shared host OS net-work stack is the main bottleneck, where the traffic flow processing involves a large amount of intermediate memory buffers and results in significant last level cache pollution. Existing OS memory allocation policies fail to exploit the locality and data sharing information among buffers. In this paper, we propose NetContainer, a software framework that achieves fine-grained hardware resource management for containerized NFV platform. NetContainer employs a cache access overheads guided page coloring scheme to coordinately address the inter-flow cache access overheads and intra-flow cache access overheads. It maps the memory buffer pages that manifest low cache access overheads (across a flow or among the flows) to the same last level cache partition. NetContainer exploits a footprint theory based method to estimate the cache access overheads and a Min-Cost Max-Flow model to guide the memory buffer mappings. We implement the NetContainer in Linux kernel and extensively evaluate it with real NFV workloads. Exper-imental results show that NetContainer outperforms conventional page coloring-based memory allocator by 48% in terms of successful call rate.