eProbe: eBPF-Enhanced Accurate Container Status Probing in Cloud-Native Systems

Cloud-native systems enhance scalability and availability by leveraging containers. For better container management and scheduling, existing container management systems (e.g., Kubernetes) employ readiness and liveness probes to probe container status. However, failures in these probing systems can lead to traffic scheduling errors, application failures, or even cluster crashes, due to real-time probing issues or implementation bugs. To address these shortcomings, we propose a non-intrusive, real-time container status probing system based on eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter), called eProbe. eProbe intercepts packets passing through containers to probe container status in real time within the operating system kernel, without additional instrumentation or modifications to existing container management systems. Our evaluations show that eProbe can accurately probe container status, whereas Kubernetes probes can only partially achieve this. Moreover, eProbe incurs a low overhead, consuming only 0.03% to 0.26% additional memory and 0.22% to 0.33% additional CPU, while introducing a 2.48% increase in response time for cloud-native applications.