Container Orchestration by Kubernetes for RDMA Networking

Abstract

With the widespread usage of containerized virtualization in data centers and clouds, it is important to enabling high-throughput and zero-copy data transfer between those containers. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) allows bypassing the kernel for packet processing by offloading it to specific RDMA-enabled NICs. The existing solutions enabling RDMA with containers are either based on custom container orchestrators (e.g., FreeFlow) or lack the ability for the control plane to manage the underlying RDMA traffic (e.g., Kubernetes RDMA plug-in via SR-IOV). The work in this paper builds off of previous work in Kubernetes to make an architecture that allows control over bandwidth requirements of RDMA within a Kubernetes cluster.