CONTC: A Traffic Control System for Container Overlay Networks

To enable inter-container communication of services on different hosts, container overlay network, the most widely used container network mode, provides a layer of virtual network between containers to transparent the physical device heterogeneous. However, overlay network produces two-layered packet encapsulation, and current container network management system cannot identify the source containers from the two-layered encapsulated packets or control the network traffics of different services. To tackle this issue, a traffic control system for container overlay networks (CONTC) is proposed and implemented by redesigning the packets processing procedure in overlay network model, enabling accurate network packet identification, multi-level network resource management and user-centric customized control. Extensive experiment results are conducted on different system settings and practical service cases to show that CONTC can provide accurate network traffic control for data flows with different network protocols and different packet sizes at both the service level and the container level. The results based on open-source microservice benchmarks also validate the correctness and effectiveness of CONTC by reducing the tail latency of single-service and multi-service environments by 37.53% and 22.33%, respectively.