Volume 16, Number 1

Comparative Study of Orchestration using gRPC API and REST API in Server Creation Time: An Openstack Case

  Authors

Hari Krishna S M and Rinki Sharma, M. S. Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, India

  Abstract

Cloud computing is the quick, simple, and economical distribution of computing services. To offer quality services in cloud infrastructure, the NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) function is a critical task for managing both infrastructure resources and network functions. Since the demand for cloud services is rapidly increasing, cloud service providers are constantly trying to reduce operational costs. Hence the elements of MANO functions have gained critical importance in cloud infrastructure. To use MANO efficiently, there are hypervisors (OpenStack) that act as a middle layer between hardware and software that are used to provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions through a set of interrelated services. These services are managed by an application programming interface (API). The existing orchestration method uses Representational state transfer (REST) API for communicating with core components of a hypervisor. These API have been integral part of creating and deploying a server. To improve the performance, this paper proposes a novel approach for orchestration based on the open-source remote procedure call framework, known as gRPC. To analyse the proposed solution, both REST and gRPC-based orchestration methods are implemented for creating and launching servers using OpenStack cloud computing platform. The server creation time is obtained for different scenarios and SFC use cases. The results show that by using gRPC, the performance in terms of server creation time of an orchestration is improved by up to 27% compared to the traditional REST-based orchestration.

  Keywords

Architectural Styles, gRPC, MANO, Network Function Virtualization, Orchestration and REST