Performance Analysis of Virtualisation Technologies in NFV and Edge Deployments

Internet adoption is increasing at the fastest rate ever driven by new mobile edge users. To meet these added demands from network services efficiently, telecom service providers are exploring virtualization technologies. NFV architecture broke the dependency on commodity hardware by decoupling network services from legacy hardware devices and implementing network functions (load balancer, firewall) in virtual machines. Multiple virtualization technologies including VMs, containers, unikernels, and kata-containers are being explored to deploy network functions. Each one of them faces a trade-off between isolation and agility. Performance analysis is especially important in upcoming Internet Of Things (IOT) and edge computing where quick responses are expected in a resource-scarce isolated environment. Containers shared kernel raises security concerns and kata containers addresses that by providing a secure light weight VM to run container. We present for the first time kata containers in respect to Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This paper studies the performance analysis of NFV virtualization technologies by deploying web services and provides descriptive results based on output. Kata provides a fast light weight VM to securely run containers but with 20-30% added overhead compared to docker containers. Unikernels are secure, light weight and are well suited to run applications with high context.