Profile Your Chains, Not Functions. Automated Network Service Profiling in DevOps Environments

Benchmarking and profiling virtual network functions (VNFs) generates input knowledge for resource management decisions taken by management and orchestration systems. Such VNFs are usually not executed in isolation but are often deployed as part of a service function chain (SFC) that connects single functions into complex structures. To manage such chains, isolated performance profiles of single functions have to be combined to get insights into the overall behavior of an SFC. This becomes particularly challenging in highly agile DevOps environments in which profiling processes need to be fully automated and detailed insights about a chain's internal structures are not always available. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatable, flexible, and platform-agnostic profiling system that allows to profile entire SFCs at once. This obviates manual modeling procedures to combine profiling results from single VNFs to reflect SFC performance. We use a case study with different SFC configurations to show that it is hard to model the resulting SFC performance based on single-VNF measurements and that performance interactions between real, non-trivial functions that are deployed in a chain exist.