RustyNet: Network Emulation over Cloud Docker Containers

Author: Guanzhou Hu @ MIT Date: Oct 6, 2019

Overview

RustyNet is a network emulator over Docker containers written in Rust. It is motivated by these two network emulators:

• Mininet: a great SDN emulator, but only supports process-level isolation and cannot scale beyond a single host.
• Yans: a very basic prototype of doing network emulation over Docker containers in Python.

RustyNet's main goals lie in the following three aspects:

1. Verify the feasibility of using the Rust language to conduct network experiments.
2. Verify the feasibility of doing network emulation over Docker containers.
3. (future) Scale such kind of emulation onto large-scale cloud containers orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), and explore the advantages and drawbacks of doing it this way.

Demonstration of how RustyNet works:

Installation

RustyNet requires the following prerequisites:

• Rust toolchain - lastest stable version
• (optional in the future) Vagrant & VirtualBox
• (currently not needed) Google Cloud CLI & Kubernetes access

RustyNet only supports execution on Linux and OS X platforms. Clone this repo and you are ready to use it.

Usage

The following is a temporary usage guide based on local Vagrant environment. RustyNet's ultimate goal is to deploy such emulation onto cloud Docker containers in the future.

Preparations

Under the project folder, do the following:

# Bring the Vagrant VM up from the provided Vagrantfile
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

# Go into synced working directory.
$ cd /rustynet

# Compile in 'release' mode.
$ cargo build --release

# Build the Docker image for RustyNet nodes, from the provided Dockerfile.
$ cd docker-env
$ sudo docker build -t rustynet/node .
$ cd ..

Run RustyNet

Initial topology is generated from a YAML config file <topo-name>.yml. Put it under topolib/ folder. (Currently this prototype always used the minimal.yml example topology.)

Run RustyNet in root user privilege:

$ sudo ./target/release/rustynet

Using RustyNet CLI runs in basically three phases:

1. Docker containers & networks will be created based on the specification in the given topology config file.
2. Then, you will enter the RustNet Shell, where you can do interactively manage your network components, and do experiments among them, e.g.,
   • RustyNet> docker ps: show all living nodes;
   • RustyNet> h1 ping h2: commands starting with a node's name will automaticallyexit be interpreted as docker exec -it [CMD], i.e., runs within that node's shell;
3. Cleaning up phase.

TODO List

• Prototyping on local Docker containers
• Tweak resource & bandwidth limits in Docker
• Publish the Docker image online & doing pull instead of real-time build
• Verify the effect of using host bridges as links
• Better way of emulating "routers" using containers
• More example topologies
• Taking in command line arguments to set logging level / clean
• Scale it up onto cloud platforms