Experimental Assessment of Containers Running on Top of Virtual Machines

TL;DR

This paper experimentally compares the performance of containers running on virtual machines with standalone VMs and containers, across various hardware resources and virtualization types, providing insights into their efficiency in cloud environments.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive experimental evaluation of container-on-VM setups versus standalone VMs and containers, covering multiple virtualization types and platforms.

Findings

Containers on VMs have different performance profiles depending on hardware resources.

Paravirtualization and full virtualization impact container performance.

Performance varies across hypervisor types and container platforms.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the cloud computing paradigm has gradually attracted more popularity due to its efficient resource usage and simple service access model. Virtualization technology is the fundamental element of cloud computing that brings several benefits to cloud users and providers, such as workload isolation, energy efficiency, server consolidation, and cost reduction. This paper examines the combination of operating system-level virtualization (containers) and hardware-level virtualization (virtual machines). To this end, the performance of containers running on top of virtual machines is experimentally compared with standalone virtual machines and containers based on different hardware resources, including the processor, main memory, disk, and network in a real testbed by running the most commonly used benchmarks. Paravirtualization and full virtualization as well as type 1 and type 2 hypervisors are covered in this study. In addition, three prevalent containerization platforms are examined.