Developing, and running an API Gateway in the cloud using a unikernel operating system

124 Pages·2016·11.37 MB·English

Developing, and running an
API Gateway in the cloud using
a unikernel operating system
Jehans Jr Storvik
Master’s Thesis Spring 2016

Developing, and running an API Gateway in
the cloud using a unikernel operating system
JehansJrStorvik
May23,2016
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Preface
Acknowledgements
• Mother and father - Thanks for leading me onto the path of higher
education.
• Kyrre Begnum - Thanks for being my supervisor for this thesis, and
for making me apply to the Network and System Administration
masterscoursebackduringmybachelorsdegree.
• AlfredBratterud, andallthedevelopersofIncludeOS-Thanksfor
allhelp,troubleshooting,andcodeexamplesprovidedforthethesis.
• AllothersupervisorsatHiOAandUiO-Thanksforcreatingagreat
study,andlearningenvironmentwithintheareaofInformatics.
• Allstudentsinmyclass-Icouldnothaveaskedforabettertimeat
HiOA.Thanks!
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Abstract
Microservices in the cloud has become an increasingly popular platform
to run services on. However, general purpose operating systems found
within most VMs in the cloud use more resources than necessary. The
proposed solution to these problems are running the services using
unikernels.
Unikernels are specialised library operating systems designed for a single
purpose. However, unikernels are still relatively new, meaning that
the outcome of running microservices in the cloud using unikernels are
unknown.
Two API Gateway services were created, and run in the cloud using
Ubuntu and IncludeOS. Several experiments were conducted to test the
latter two, and the data compared. An analysis on the development
process, and a feature analysis with other cloud services was done
aswell.
Ubuntu was declared as the current best alternative to run services on
in the cloud in this thesis. Yet, IncludeOS proved to work for running
microservices in the cloud, and showed some promising features such as
0 CPU during idle, low memory footprint, and 13,9% more efficient in
terms of CPU usage at handling 1000 client connections per second than
Ubuntu.
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Problemstatement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2 Background 3
2.1 Operatingsystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1.1 Generalpurpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1.2 Unikernel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1.3 IncludeOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1.4 Relevantresearchonunikernels . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 ApplicationProgrammingInterface(API) . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 APIGateway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.4 CloudComputing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.4.1 Cloudenvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.4.2 Microservicesinthecloud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.5 Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.5.1 FullVirtualizationusingbinarytranslation . . . . . . 8
2.5.2 Hardwareassistedvirtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.5.3 Paravirtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.5.4 VirtualMachineMonitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.5.5 VirtualMachine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.5.6 ProgrammableTimerInterrupt . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.5.7 Qemu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.5.8 KVM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.6 Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.6.1 Netbeans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.6.2 C++ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.6.3 Git . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.6.4 Httperf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.6.5 POSIXNetworkinglibrary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3 Approach 13
3.1 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2 Designstage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.2.1 Functionalityforservice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.2.2 Cloudenvironmentforservice . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.3 Implementationstage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.3.1 Multiplatform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
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3.3.2 Implementationtools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.3.3 PrototypeoftheAPIGateway . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.3.4 Testingtheimplementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4 Designofexperiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4.1 Experimentscripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4.2 Dataanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4 Design 21
4.1 APIGateway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.1.1 Lowlevelfunctionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.1.2 SupportedAPIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.1.3 Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.1.4 Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.1.5 VirtualAPI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.1.6 Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.1.7 Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.2 Prototyping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.3.1 Experimentenvironment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.3.2 Experimentscript-DataGatherer.py . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.3.3 Experiment1-CPUusagewhileidling . . . . . . . . 33
4.3.4 Experiment2-CPUusagewithtraffic . . . . . . . . . 34
4.3.5 Experiment3-Testingcachingfunctionality . . . . . 34
4.3.6 Experiment4-Batchprocessingwithcaching . . . . 34
5 Implementation 35
5.1 APIGatewayservice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.1.1 service.cpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.1.2 apigateway.cpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5.1.3 api.cpp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.1.4 Caching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.1.5 Loadbalancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.2 Experimentenvironmentinstallation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.2.1 IncludeOSVMinstallationandconfiguration . . . . . 39
5.2.2 UbuntuVM14.04installationandconfiguration . . . 41
5.3 Testingtheimplementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
5.4 Experimentscript-DataGatherer.py . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
6 Results-Analysisandmeasurements 47
6.1 DevelopingandrunningaserviceinIncludeOScomparedto
Ubuntu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
6.1.1 Differenceinservices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
6.1.2 Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
6.1.3 Programmingtheservice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
6.1.4 Unikernelsforrunningmicroservicestiming . . . . . 49
6.2 FeatureanalysisfortheIncludeOSAPIGatewayservice . . 50
6.2.1 Varnish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
6.2.2 Featureanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
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