Containers vs. virtual machines: performance comparison

Abstract

Server virtualization is a technological innovation widely used in information technology (IT) companies. Virtualization provides a platform to run different operating system services in the cloud. It makes it easy to build multiple virtual machines on a single basic physical machine, either in the form of hypervisors or containers. To host many microservices applications, emerging technology has introduced a model consisting of different operations performed by smaller individual deployed services. Therefore, the demand for low-cost virtualization techniques is developing rapidly. There are many lightweight virtualization technologies; Docker is one of them, which is an open-source platform. This technology enables developers and system administrators to build, create, and run applications using the Docker engine. This document provides performance evaluation of Docker containers and virtual machines using standard benchmark tools such as Sysbench, Phoronix, and Apache, including CPU performance, memory performance, storage read/write performance, load test and measurement of operating speed.