A Performance Comparison of Container Networking Alternatives

Abstract

In recent years, containerization technologies have rapidly gained momentum in the industry for the purpose of managing and deploying applications and services at the expense of virtual machines. Despite its numerous benefits, several challenges still remain to be addressed from the inter-container communication perspective, notably as existing container networking fails to meet the requirements of container-based applications in terms of isolation, portability and performance. As a result, trade-offs between these properties must be considered, typically resulting in performance being sacrificed. In this article, we investigate the impact of using RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) for inter-container communication. To this end, we perform a comparison between various relevant inter-container solutions with RoCE. The experimentation results demonstrate that RDMA-based networking solutions outperform existing networking solutions in terms of throughput, latency, and CPU overhead.