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A Performance Evaluation of Lightweight Approaches to Virtualization

Authors:
Max Plauth
Lena Feinbube
Andreas Polze

Keywords: Lightweight Virtualization; Performance; Unikernel; Container

Abstract:
The growing prevalence of the microservice paradigm has initiated a shift away from operating single image appliances that host many services, towards encapsulating each service within individual, smaller images. As a result thereof, the demand for low-overhead virtualization techniques is increasing. While containerization approaches already enjoy great popularity, unikernels are emerging as alternative approaches. With both approaches undergoing rapid improvements, the current landscape of lightweight approaches to virtualization presents a confusing scenery, impeding the task of picking an adequate technology for an intended purpose. While previous work has mostly dealt with comparing the performance of either approach with whole-system virtualization, this work provides an overarching performance evaluation covering containers, unikernels, whole-system virtualization, native hardware, and combinations thereof. Representing common workloads in cloud-based applications, we evaluate application performance by the example of HTTP servers and a key-value store.

Pages: 4 to 9

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: February 19, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-529-6

Location: Athens, Greece

Dates: from February 19, 2017 to February 23, 2017