Tech Report: Experiences from benchmarking tunnelling mechanisms

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 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 providers tasked with design and development decisions of multi-cloud providers and orchestrators.