Autothrottle: Satisfying Network Performance Requirements for Containers

Kyungwoon Lee, Kwanhoon Lee, Hyunchan Park, Jaehyun Hwang, Chuck Yoo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This article investigates how to satisfy network performance requirements that are crucial in achieving the service level objectives (SLOs) in clouds. Traditional techniques for network performance management have a limited ability to satisfy the network SLOs. Our in-depth analysis reveals that the fundamental reason comes from decoupling of the CPU scheduler and the network traffic controller as the current CPU scheduler is not aware of such network requirements but only provides a fair-share amount of CPU to all containers. Thus, the container cannot perform the amount of network processing as needed to satisfy its SLO when the CPU allocation is insufficient. In this article, we propose Autothrottle that dynamically adjusts the CPU allocation for the containers to satisfy their network SLOs. The key element of Autothrottle is a throttle algorithm that autonomously determines the amount of CPU for each container needed to satisfy the requirement. We implement Autothrottle in the Linux kernel and evaluate it with massive real-world workloads such as Apache Kafka. Our evaluation results show that Autothrottle successfully satisfies the given network SLO only with a 2% gap while the existing scheme achieves 20% less than the SLO. We further observe that Autothrottle also reduces the CPU overhead in network processing by 19%, improving the network throughput by 27% compared to the existing scheme.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2096-2109
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023 Apr 1

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
In part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) under Grants NRF-2022R1A2C1011090 and NRF-2020R1F1A1067365

Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Cloud computing
  • containers
  • network performance
  • service level objectives

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications

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