Performance considerations of network functions virtualization using containers

The network performance of virtual machines plays a critical role in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and several technologies have been developed to address hardware-level virtualization shortcomings. Recent advances in operating system level virtualization and deployment platforms such as Docker have made containers an ideal candidate for high performance application encapsulation and deployment. However, Docker and other solutions typically use lower-performing networking mechanisms. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using technologies designed to accelerate virtual machine networking with containers, in addition to quantifying the network performance of container-based VNFs compared to the state-of-the-art virtual machine solutions. Our results show that containerized applications can provide lower latency and delay variation, and can take advantage of high performance networking technologies previously only used for hardware virtualization.