Benchmarking tunnel and encryption methodologies in cloud environments

TL;DR

This paper benchmarks various tunneling and encryption methods used in multi-cloud environments, providing data to guide deployment choices for improved network performance and security.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive performance comparison of tunneling and encryption technologies specifically for multi-cloud deployments, filling a gap in practical benchmarking data.

Findings

Performance varies significantly across different tunneling methods.

Certain encryption techniques offer better throughput and latency.

Guidelines for selecting suitable tunneling and encryption methods are provided.

Abstract

The recent past has seen the adoption of multi-cloud deployments by enterprises due to availability, features, and regulatory requirements. A typical deployment involves parts of an application/workloads running inside a private cloud with the other parts spread across multiple on-prem/public clouds. Typical cluster-to-cluster networking in such deployments involve the establishment of site-to-site encrypted tunnels to connect the workloads. In this report, we benchmark the performance of various tunneling and encryption technologies to provide directions on their use in multi-cloud deployments. Based on the various experiments conducted on three different testbeds, we present quantifiable data which can be leveraged by operators and cloud providers tasked with design and development decisions of multi-cloud network connectivity and orchestration.