Exploring the Potential of FreeBSD Virtualization in Containerized Environments

Abstract

Enterprise and Cloud environments are rapidly evolving with the use of lightweight virtualization mechanisms such as containers. Containerization allow users to deploy applications in any environment faster and more efficiently than using virtual machines. However, most of the work in this area focused on Linux-based containerization such as Docker and LXC and other mature solutions such as FreeBSD Jails have not been adopted by production-ready environments. In this work we explore the use of FreeBSD virtualization and provide a comparative study with respect to Linux containerization using Apache Spark. Preliminary results show that, while Linux containers provide better performance, FreeBSD solutions provide more stable and consistent results.