Scalability of Container Overlays for Policy Enforcement in Digital Marketplaces

Digital marketplaces (DMPs) are emerging as a framework for organizations to share their data. Security and support for multi-tenancy are the key features of DMPs. DMPs infrastructure can be built upon container-based networks in the cloud environments. However, there is not at the moment an in-depth analysis of the capability of container networks to support this mode of operation. In this paper, we evaluate the capability of Cilium and Calico, the two most popular container network techniques, in providing security (policy scalability) and handling the multi-tenancy requirements (pod scalability) of DMPs. We first measured the policy scalability in the network, and both Calico and Cilium scale well. However, by studying the pod scalability we determine there is around 50% throughput degradation in both technologies by increasing the number of pods from one to forty.