The Research On Connection Acceleration Of High-performance Container Overlay Network

Large-scale cloud applications today are often deployed using multiple containers.Each container communicates and cooperates with each other,and container overlay network is the de facto method to provide connectivity among these containers.However,existing tunneling-based overlay network incurs significant performance overhead due to the need of transformation for every packet.Recent work through manipulating network sockets,allows containers to use host OS sockets directly thus they can achieve good performance without extra packet tunneling.Nevertheless,the connection setup is significantly slowed down,which greatly hurts the performance of many cloud applications that must process short connections at high speed.In view of the above problems,we make an in depth study on how to improve the performance of container overlay network,especially the connection setup.The main work is as follows:(1)We analyzes and evaluates the performance bottleneck of the existing container overlay network.In this thesis,we analyze the reasons for the low transmission efficiency of tunnel-based container overlay network and the performance problems of Slim,a cutting-edge container overlay network,i.e.,the long connection setup time.To improve persuasion,we also evaluate the impact of the long connection time on the performance of typical applications.(2)We proposes a high-performance container overlay network solution,SlimFast.SlimFast can provide an efficient network data transmission mechanism for containers,as also as the fast connection setup.Compared with the tunnel-based container overlay network,Slimfast can achieve better data transmission efficiency.In addition,Slimfast needs no extra communication during connection setup.It reserves a dedicated host port for the container network and using socket mapping table to locally find the right container socket during connection setup.Thus SlimFast can achieve faster connection setup.(3)We design and implemente high-performance container overlay network SlimFast based on Linux operating system.SlimFast can be flexibly and dynamically linked to the container application and requires no modification to existing container applications.(4)We thoroughly evaluate SlimFast’s performance using dedicated micro-benchmarks as well as real applications.We evaluate some dedicated micro-benchmarks of SlimFast,such as the connection setup time and the CPU utilization during data transmission.We also apply SlimFast to real applications,including Nginx and Memcached.Experimental results show that SlimFast improves the throughput of Nginx proxy and Memcached by about 0.9x and 2.2x,respectively.The existing container overlay network can not well meet the communication performance requirements of container applications in cloud data center.SlimFast is fast during connection setup time and keeps low-overhead during data transmission,which can greatly improve the performance of upper-layer applications and can better meet the communication performance requirements of container applications.