Performance evaluation of wireguard in kubernetes cluster

Abstract: Containerization has gained popularity for deploying applications in a lightweight environment. Kubernetes and Docker have gained a lot of dominance for scalable deployments of applications in containers. Usually, kubernetes clusters are deployed within a single shared network. For high availability of the application, multiple kubernetes clusters are deployed in multiple regions, due to which the number of kubernetes clusters keeps on increasing over time. Maintaining and managing mul-tiple kubernetes clusters is a challenging and time-consuming process for system administrators or DevOps engineers. These issues can be addressed by deploying a kubernetes cluster in a multi-region environment. A multi-region kubernetes de-ployment reduces the hassle of handling multiple kubernetes masters by having onlyone master with worker nodes spread across multiple regions. In this thesis, we investigated a multi-region kubernetes cluster’s network performance by deploying a multi-region kubernetes cluster with worker nodes across multiple openstack regions and tunneled using wireguard(a VPN protocol). A literature review on the common factors that influence the network performance in a multi-region deployment is conducted for the network performance metrics. Then, we compared the request-response time of this multi-region kubernetes cluster with the regular kubernetes cluster to evaluate the performance of the deployed multi-region kubernetescluster. The results obtained show that a kubernetes cluster with worker nodes ina single shared network has an average request-response time of 2ms. In contrast, the kubernetes cluster with worker nodes in different openstack projects and regions has an average request-response time of 14.804 ms. This thesis aims to provide a performance comparison of the kubernetes cluster with and without wireguard, fac-tors affecting the performance, and an in-depth understanding of concepts related to kubernetes and wireguard.