Containers have become the predominant virtualization technique for deploying microservices in cloud environments. However, container networking, critical for microservice functionality, often introduces significant overhead and resource consumption, potentially degrading the performance of microservices. This challenge arises from the complexity of the software-based network data plane, responsible for network virtualization and access control within container traffic. To tackle this challenge, we propose Hyperion, a novel hardware-based container networking system that prioritizes high performance and security. Leveraging smartNICs, commonly found in cloud environments, Hyperion implements a fully-functional container network data plane, encompassing network virtualization and access control. It also has the capability to dynamically optimize its data plane for agile responses to frequent changes in container environments, ensuring up-to-date data plane operation. This hardware-based design empowers Hyperion to significantly improve the overall container networking performance without relying on the host system resources. Notably, Hyperion seamlessly integrates with existing containerized applications without necessitating modifications. Our evaluation shows that compared to state-of-the-art solutions, Hyperion achieves significant improvements in HTTP container communication latency and throughput by up to 2.25x and 4.3x, respectively. Furthermore, it reduces CPU utilization associated with container networking by up to 4x.
