Can “micro VM” become the next generation computing platform?: Performance comparison between light weight Virtual Machine, container, and traditional Virtual Machine

Abstract

Serverless computing - including “Function as a service (FaaS)”, gives a flexible computing model for users. Today, cloud providers use container to create isolated computing environment for FaaS users. However, containers share a same kernel for all instances run on top of that, which cannot guarantee an ABI-level security as virtual machine does. Therefore, a new kind of virtual machine with container-level low overhead, named as “micro VM” or “light weight virtual machine” comes. But using virtual machines means trade off. Comparing to the high performance and lightweight containers, virtual machines usually have unavoidable problems like I/O (input and output), and some existing problems of containers like the cold start latency may become more severe. But how much it takes and if it is deserving? This paper provides a comparison between traditional virtual machine, container, and the new light weight virtual machine (named micro VM) in terms of scalability and performance, aiming to determine whether the micro VM can be the suitable computing platform for FaaS.