Performance evaluation of a virtualized HTTP proxy in KVM and Docker

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a new paradigm in which network services are virtualized and can run in common and generic hardware, improving service agility and reducing costs. There are many factors that encourage NFV employment but some particular requirements must be carefully evaluated, such as choosing the virtualization technology. This paper provides a performance analysis of two open source virtualization solutions, KVM and Docker, in an HTTP proxy scenario. Our results show that Docker process HTTP requests in a lower time than KVM, due to its lightweight virtualization. Moreover, based on the results, we provide a broad discussion about each virtualization solution applied to NFV environments.