Software-defined networking of Linux containers

Abstract

Today's IT organizations who act as service providers are under increasing pressure to keep up with the continuous and growing demand for IT services. Through the shift from interactive, manual processes to automated, self-deployment of resources, the providers can increase the efficiency of delivering on-demand services. Virtualized resources, particularly virtual machines and containers that are in the focus of the present paper, make the infrastructure transparent to the final user, are easier to be configured and can seamlessly migrate to another host, in real time - preserving processes status. The Linux containers represent an emerging technology for fast and lightweight process virtualization. Because the containers require less resources to run by sharing the operating system kernel, a higher density of containers can be achieved on the same host, opposed to other virtualization solutions like hardware or para-virtualization. The paper presents a solution to enable the on-demand provisioning of Linux containers using Software-Defined Networking, a flexible approach to treating even control-level resources “as a Service”.