EZPath: Expediting Container Network Traffic via Programmable Switches

Containerization, while getting popular in data centers, faces practical challenges due to the sharing nature of cloud networks among tens of thousands containers simultaneously and dynamically. While the typical overlay approach enables network virtualization to facilitate multi-tenant isolation and container portability, this approach often suffers from degraded performance. Other proposed schemes addressing this performance bottleneck require either specialized hardware support, or customized software and extra maintenance. In this paper, we propose EZPath, a novel approach that can seamlessly expedite the container traffic by leveraging the programmable Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches in clouds. By utilizing the underlying programmable switch's data plane capabilities, EZPath can offload traffic directly from the container to the ToR switches, thus creating a fast and easy path to mitigate the network bottleneck. Such a ToR switch based solution is transparent to user applications, and does not require the change of OS kernel or the support of additional hardware. Using typical container workloads, we evaluate EZPath, and the results show that EZPath can significantly improve the application performance over the default overlay networking, e.g., a 35% throughput increase and a 42% tail latency reduction for Memcached.