@inproceedings{zhuo2019slim,
author = {Zhuo, Danyang and Zhang, Kaiyuan and Zhu, Yibo and Liu, Hongqiang Harry and Rockett, Matthew and Krishnamurthy, Arvind and Anderson, Thomas},
title = {Slim: OS Kernel Support for a Low-Overhead Container Overlay Network},
organization = {USENIX},
booktitle = {16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '19)},
year = {2019},
month = {February},
abstract = {Containers have become the de facto method for hosting large-scale distributed applications. Container overlay networks are essential to providing portability for containers, yet they impose significant overhead in terms of throughput, latency, and CPU utilization. The key problem is a reliance on packet transformation to implement network virtualization. As a result, each packet has to traverse the network stack twice in both the sender and the receiver’s host OS kernel. We have designed and implemented Slim, a low-overhead container overlay network that implements network virtualization by manipulating connection-level metadata. Our solution maintains compatibility with today’s containerized applications. Evaluation results show that Slim improves the throughput of an in-memory key-value store by 66% while reducing the latency by 42%. Slim reduces the CPU utilization of the in-memory key-value store by 54%. Slim also reduces the CPU utilization of a web server by 28%-40%, a database server by 25%, and a stream processing framework by 11%.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/slim-os-kernel-support-for-a-low-overhead-container-overlay-network/},
}