Experimental assessment of containers running on top of virtual machines

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. Virtualisation 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 virtualisation (containers) and hardware-level virtualisation (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. Paravirtualisation and full virtualisation as well as type 1 and type 2 hypervisors are covered in this study. In addition, three prevalent containerisation platforms are examined.