Measuring Docker Performance: What a Mess!!!

Abstract

Today, a new technology is going to change the way platforms for the internet of services are designed and managed. This technology is called container (e.g. Docker and LXC). The internet of service industry is adopting the container technology both for internal usage and as commercial offering. The use of container as base technology for large-scale systems opens many challenges in the area of resource management at run-time, for example: autoscaling, optimal deployment and monitoring. Specifically, monitoring of container based systems is at the ground of any resource management solution, and it is the focus of this work. This paper explores the tools available to measure the performance of Docker from the perspective of the host operating system and of the virtualization environment, and it provides a characterization of the CPU and disk I/O overhead introduced by containers.