A Two-Tiered Approach to I/O Quality of Service in Docker Containers

Linux containers allow applications to run in complete isolation from one another without the extra overhead of running entirely separate operating systems. This approach eliminates memory overheads associated with virtualization and virtual machines and helps businesses run their day-today applications. Unfortunately, multiple applications sharing the same resources can result in substantial resource contention among the applications in the containers and substantial performance loss. One way to mitigate this loss in performance is by ensuring quality of service (QoS) guaranteeing that the application of interest meets the performance requirements. Existing work targets ways of managing CPU, network, and memory contention, however, no solutions exist for managing contention associated with I/O. To address the I/O contention challenge in containers, we propose a two-tiered approach (i.e., at both the cluster and node levels) that extends Docker and Docker Swarm, making both capable of monitoring and controlling the I/O of Dockers containers. We demonstrate how our two-tiered approach has the potential for higher resource utilization without the effects of contention.