Container-based 3-tier Service Enhancement with Networking Function Virtualization and Network-aware Service Mesh

Abstract

With the advent of cloud-first computing era, the specialized application services over dedicated clusters are gradually migrating to cloud-based shared infrastructures. With this trend, Monolithic architecture showed its limitations and the services are switching to MSA (Micro Service Architecture). Service Composition of these services are done with allocating resources from shared cloud infrastructure to accommodate all functions and stitching them with networking. Also, container-based service composition's now in favor against VM-based one.

However, these services usually depended on external load balancers and firewalls, and traffic encryption wasn't considered so important like nowadays at the time the services are designed. The effective Service Composition is a challenging subject for the complicated form of such Web-App-DB 3-tier application legacy services at datacenter, which may require additional protection, authentication, and load-balancing employing Networking Function Virtualization. This paper focuses on the lightweight, fast Container-based Service Composition for such services. For small-sized datacenters, we prepared an 3-tier service with lightweight protection, authentication, and load-balancing employing Networking Function Virtualization. We made prototyped Container-based Service Composition for such hardened services: one with with Docker Swarm and another with Kubernetes. We executed Service Composition of the prepared service with the prototypes and compared them with the load test on the composed service.

Also, even after the services are composed, they're useless if they can't stay reliable and process the service user’s requests. As the current network infrastructures don't guarantee reliable inter-connect, the service and its traffic must be consistently monitored to check if it’s running smoothly and controlled to recover if it isn't. Also, this monitor/control must be well coordinated to be capable of recovering such infrastructure issues. We designed Network-aware Service Mesh, which is recently getting popular, presented the possibility of such coordination of monitor/control on container-based 3-tier services via partial verification.