Sidecar based resource estimation method for virtualized environments

Abstract

The widespread use of virtualization technologies in telecommunication system resulted in series of benefits, as flexibility, agility and increased resource usage efficiency. Nevertheless, the use of Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) in virtualized modules (e.g., containers, virtual machines) also means that some legacy mechanisms that are crucial for a telco grade operation are no longer efficient. Specifically, the monitoring of the resource sets (e.g., CPU power, memory capacity) allocated to VNFs cannot rely anymore on the methods developed for earlier deployment scenarios. Even the recent monitoring solutions designed for cloud environments is rendered useless if the VNF vendor and the telco solution supplier has to deploy its product into a virtualized environment, since it does not have access to the host level monitoring tools. In this paper we propose a sidecar-based solution to evaluate the resources available for a virtualized process. We evaluated the accuracy of our proposal in a proof of concept deployment, using KVM, Docker and Kubernetes virtualization technologies, respectively. We show that our proposal can provide real monitoring data and discuss its applicability.