Latency-Optimal Network Microservice Architecture Deployment in SDN

The Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm enables network administrators to manage the behavior of the network thanks to a centralized control plane. By programming network-level applications, it is possible to determine how traffic flows must be handled programmatically. In the same manner that computing applications have evolved from monolithic to microservice-based architectures, network-level applications are expected to evolve into microservice-based SDN controllers, implementing each application as a replicable and individually deployable component of the SDN controller. In such a scenario, the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by traffic flows depends on how these microservices are placed and deployed through the network topology. In this work, we provide a system to optimize the QoS of the traffic in microservice-based SDN networks by optimally placing and replicating the network-level microservices. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution over a real network topology with varying traffic loads.