A Web-based Orchestrator for Dynamic Service Function Chaining Development with Kubernetes

Abstract

The research community has been moving attention from Virtual Network Function (VNF) to Cloud-native Network Function (CNF) since cloudification has brought the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to an advanced level. It has already been demonstrated that cloud-native technology brings high flexibility and efficiency to large-scale network service deployment compared to the traditional VNF with Virtual Machines (VMs). However, more work is needed to provide a flexible and reliable Service Function Chaining (SFC) development solution in a cloud-native environment. This paper proposes a web-based orchestrator system to deploy an SFC use case consisting of multiple CNFs in a multi-node Kubernetes cluster using Network Service Mesh (NSM). We demonstrate a cloud-native SFC framework that allows users to dynamically create container-based SFC rather than the traditional VMs with NFV/SDN controller approach. Further, additional work is presented with the support of an open-source monitoring system, Prometheus, to validate the SFC path.