Evaluation of an SDN-based Microservice Architecture

Microservice architectures decompose applications into individual components for enhanced maintainability and horizontal scaling, but also comes with an increased cost for orchestrating the services. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) enables the dynamic configuration of network switches using controllers. In this paper we propose a microservice architecture that leverages SDN to orchestrate the microservices with the goal of reducing the orchestration latency cost. We perform a set of experiments using Mininet in which we implement a tailor-made microservice application that uses SDN for orchestration in combination with a set of different controllers and load balancers. Our results show that our proposed architecture performs in the same order of magnitude as a corresponding monolithic system.