Performance Considerations for the Deployment of Video Streaming Pipelines Using Containers

Abstract: Cloud-based video processing is an area depending heavily on the hardware’s ability to process huge amounts of packets. Nowadays, we can observe industry drifting away from commonly used FPGAs in lieu of a more flexible software approach. Docker container has been considered a promising technology for constructing video streaming pipelines as it provides a fast and easy way to package and distribute software. Recent developments in the Network Function Virtualization field showed that fast packet processing frameworks like Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) have a potential to improve the performance of network function chains. This technology could be an enabler for software video processing to approach hardware solutions, yet it is still in quite an early stage and generates many questions about usage, deployment, and performance. This thesis shows that it is possible to build packet processing pipelines using DPDK, running dozens of video processing microservices simultaneously on a single machine. The project implementation was evaluated in terms of latency and throughput and behaviour of co-running applications on a single CPU core was modelled.