Quark: A High-Performance Secure Container Runtime for Serverless Computing
Chenxingyu Zhao, Yulin Sun, Ying Xiong, Arvind Krishnamurthy

TL;DR
Quark is a high-performance, secure container runtime designed for serverless computing, utilizing a custom co-designed kernel and VMM to significantly improve latency, throughput, and startup times over traditional solutions.
Contribution
It introduces a novel co-designed guest kernel and VMM, QKernel and QVisor, enabling high-performance secure containers tailored for serverless environments.
Findings
Reduces P95 latency by 79.3% compared to Kata
Increases throughput by 2.43x over Kata
Achieves 96.5% lower startup latency and 81.3% memory savings
Abstract
Secure container runtimes serve as the foundational layer for creating and running containers, which is the bedrock of emerging computing paradigms like microservices and serverless computing. Although existing secure container runtimes indeed enhance security via running containers over a guest kernel and a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM or Hypervisor), they incur performance penalties in critical areas such as networking, container startup, and I/O system calls. In our practice of operating microservices and serverless computing, we build a high-performance secure container runtime named Quark. Unlike existing solutions that rely on traditional VM technologies by importing Linux for the guest kernel and QEMU for the VMM, we take a different approach to building Quark from the ground up, paving the way for extreme customization to unlock high performance. Our development centers on…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Software System Performance and Reliability · IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
