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Parallelizing packet processing in container overlay networks

Authors:

Manish Munikar,

Jia RaoAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '21: Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

Pages 261 - 276

https://doi.org/10.1145/3447786.3456241

Published: 21 April 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Container networking, which provides connectivity among containers on multiple hosts, is crucial to building and scaling container-based microservices. While overlay networks are widely adopted in production systems, they cause significant performance degradation in both throughput and latency compared to physical networks. This paper seeks to understand the bottlenecks of in-kernel networking when running container overlay networks. Through profiling and code analysis, we find that a prolonged data path, due to packet transformation in overlay networks, is the culprit of performance loss. Furthermore, existing scaling techniques in the Linux network stack are ineffective for parallelizing the prolonged data path of a single network flow.

We propose Falcon, a fast and balanced container networking approach to scale the packet processing pipeline in overlay networks. Falcon pipelines software interrupts associated with different network devices of a single flow on multiple cores, thereby preventing execution serialization of excessive software interrupts from overloading a single core. Falcon further supports multiple network flows by effectively multiplexing and balancing software interrupts of different flows among available cores. We have developed a prototype of Falcon in Linux. Our evaluation with both micro-benchmarks and real-world applications demonstrates the effectiveness of Falcon, with significantly improved performance (by 300% for web serving) and reduced tail latency (by 53% for data caching).

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cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '21: Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

April 2021

631 pages

ISBN:9781450383349

DOI:10.1145/3447786

General Chairs:
Antonio Barbalace
The University of Edinburgh
,
Pramod Bhatotia
Technical University of Munich
,
Program Chairs:
Lorenzo Alvisi
Cornell University
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Cristian Cadar
Imperial College London

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Published: 21 April 2021

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EuroSys '21: Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

April 26 - 28, 2021

Online Event, United Kingdom

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EuroSys '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 181 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603287.3651203
Qi SMonis LZeng ZWang IRamakrishnan K(2024)SPRIGHT: High-Performance eBPF-Based Event-Driven, Shared-Memory Processing for Serverless ComputingIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.336656132:3(2539-2554)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3366561
You MSeo MKim JShin SNam J(2024)Hyperion: Hardware-Based High-Performance and Secure System for Container NetworksIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing10.1109/TCC.2024.340317512:3(844-858)Online publication date: Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCC.2024.3403175
Xie JMa CYu HLuo LSun G(2024)Analysis and Optimization for Passive One-way Delay Measurement Tax in Container Networks2024 IEEE 17th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)10.1109/CLOUD62652.2024.00036(247-255)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD62652.2024.00036
Liu HLi WPang YPei RHu YLiu YSuo LLi K(2023)Accelerating Data Delivery of Latency-Sensitive Applications in Container Overlay NetworkIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2023.330074534:12(3046-3058)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
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Lei JMunikar MLu HJia R(2023)Accelerating Packet Processing in Container Overlay Networks via Packet-level Parallelism2023 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)10.1109/IPDPS54959.2023.00018(79-89)Online publication date: May-2023
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Qi SMonis LZeng ZWang IRamakrishnan KKuipers FOrda A(2022)SPRIGHTProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference10.1145/3544216.3544259(780-794)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
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Munikar MLei JLu HRao J(2022)Prism: Streamlined Packet Processing for Containers with Flow Prioritization2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00040(336-346)Online publication date: Jul-2022
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