Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Microservices on Confidential Containers in Mutli-access Edge Computing Environments

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) in Edge-cloud computing continuum environments is an emerging technology that enables locality-aware low-latency processing for requests from edge devices. Confidential Containers (CoCo) are an emerging confidential computing technology designed for protecting in-use data in cloud datacenters. Although containers in a MEC layer can help reduce latency for requests from edge devices, the current increasing demands for security features such as confidential computing and memory integrity protection will seriously affect expected end-to-end latencies of microservice applications. In this paper, we build a CoCo environment using Kata containers on the MEC layer and attempt to evaluate microservice-level application behavior for the advanced security features. Especially, we focus on breaking down the latency into memory access level, microservice component level, and the end-to-end latency level. From the results, we observe that 9% overhead is incurred for each memory access when applying confidential computing with memory integrity protection. At the individual microservices level, we observed the latency for gRPC communication and memcached access are increased up to 40 %. We also reveal that the latency overheads in microservice-level and application-level are from twice to 4 times larger than those observed in memory access level.