Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 8, numbers 3 and 4, 2015 // View article

How to Operate Container Clusters more Efficiently? Some Insights Concerning Containers, Software-Defined-Networks, and their sometimes Counterintuitive Impact on Network Performance

Authors:
Nane Kratzke
Peter-Christian Quint

Keywords: Container; Cluster; Software-Defined-Network; SDN; HTTP; REST; Microservice; Overlay Network; Performance; Docker; Weave.

Abstract:
In previous work, we concluded that container technologies and overlay networks typically have negative performance impacts, mainly due to an additional layer to networking. This is what everybody would expect, only the degree of impact might be questionable. These negative performance impacts can be accepted (if they stay moderate), due to a better flexibility and manageability of the resulting systems. However, we draw our conclusion only on data covering small core machine types. This extended work additionally analyzed the impact of various (high core) machine types of different public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, AWS and Google Compute Engine, GCE) and comes to a more differentiated view and some astonishing results for high core machine types. Our findings stand to reason that a simple and cost effective strategy is to operate container cluster with highly similar high core machine types (even across different cloud service providers). This strategy should cover major relevant and complex data transfer rate reducing effects of containers, container clusters and software-defined-networks appropriately.

Pages: 203 to 214

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2015. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2015

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644