NFV project proposal

Telecommunication operators are currently considering Kubernetes as the preferred platform for their services, both network-oriented and general purpose. However, Kubernetes currently lacks support for network service chains. Projects such as Network Service Mesh and Multus are partially addressing this gap. However, tests done @POLITO suggest that NSM is not easy to use and, under some conditions, its performance can be very poor. On the other hand, Multus is much simpler, but it lacks some of the primitives that are commonly required by Kubernetes services (e.g., autoscaling).

This project leverages a seminal prototype done in POLITO and aims at extending Multus two ingredients: (1) a better integration with Kubernetes, making use of new operators such as a "cross-connect" K8s operator that can be leveraged to create service chains, and (2) eBPF-based networking primitives to transparently connect NFV pods, hence providing automatic scaling with the transparent deployment of load-balancers among the involved services.

The expected outcome of this project is (1) a prototype of the new system, based on Multus, (2) the setup of a fruitful interaction with the Kubernetes community to create a software solution that can be possibly merged within official CNCF projects, (3) a performance characterization of the resulting system compared to existing alternatives.