Containerization technologies have risen in popularity for deploying microservices applications in cloud-native environments, offering the benefits of traditional virtualization with reduced overhead. However, existing container networking solutions lack support for applications requiring isolated link-layer communications among containers in different clusters. These communications are fundamental to enable the seamless integration of cloud-native solutions in 5G and beyond networks. Accordingly, we present an SDN-enabled networking solution that supports the creation of isolated link-layer virtual networks between containers across different Kubernetes clusters by building virtual circuits that dynamically adapt to changes in the topology. In this article, we introduce our solution, highlighting its advantages over existing alternatives, and provide a comprehensive design overview. Additionally, we validate it through an experiment, offering a deeper understanding of its functionality. Our work fills an existing gap for applications with inter-cluster link-layer networking access requirements in the cloud-native ecosystem.

More info: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128624003116