Measurement and Evaluation for Docker Container Networking

Abstract

Container technology is a virtualization technology at the operating system level. It is more in line with future data center needs for its lightweight resource management, second-level start-up features. As the bridge between containers, container network plays a very important role in container life cycle system. This paper investigates and analyzes the current status of the development of container network, mainly container network model and network solutions. Besides we design experiments to measure and evaluate the performance of three mainstream network solutions (Flannel, Swarm Overlay, Calico). Our experiments show that Calico is of the highest performance and its TCP throughput is almost the same to host, but the configuration is the most complicated; Flannel configuration is simple, but it is designed for Kubernetes and the performance is not high; Swarm overlay configuration is simple with low performance. For it is originally native to Docker, its potential applications are very considerable.