Abstract

Large enterprises increasingly rely on Kubernetes platforms to host critical application and network services across data-center and cloud environments. As these environments scale, efficient use of CPU and memory can increase workload density, reduce infrastructure requirements, and preserve capacity for business applications and services.

F5, Inc. commissioned Tolly to evaluate the infrastructure efficiency and performance of F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition (CNE) delivering L4+CGNAT and DNS services as cloud-native network functions. Tolly compared CNE with a tested virtualized network function (VNF) deployment in a Red Hat OpenShift environment running on bare-metal Dell PowerEdge systems. 

Tolly measured L4+CGNAT throughput and latency using iPerf3 and evaluated DNS query performance using dnsperf. In addition to application performance, Tolly measured CPU and memory consumption to quantify the infrastructure efficiency of each deployment model. Both CNE and VNF configurations were allocated four CPUs and 8GB of RAM, providing a consistent basis for comparison. 

Testing demonstrated significant resource-efficiency advantages for BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition. For L4+CGNAT, CNE delivered comparable throughput, 3,064 Mbps versus 3,177 Mbps for the VNF, while consuming 79.7% less CPU and 98.5% less memory. CNE also reduced p95 L4+CGNAT latency by 82%. For DNS processing, CNE sustained 64,985 queries per second, nearly 1.9× the VNF throughput, while consuming 91.5% less CPU. CNE delivered 123× more DNS queries per GB of memory and reduced average DNS latency by 48%. 

The results demonstrate that F5 BIG-IP Cloud-Native Edition can deliver L4+CGNAT and DNS services with substantially lower CPU and memory requirements than the tested VNF deployment while maintaining strong application performance, enabling large enterprises to make more efficient use of Kubernetes infrastructure.