Virtualization and Containerization of Application Infrastructure: A Comparison Mathijs Jeroen Scheepers University of Twente P.O. Box 217, 7500AE Enschede The Netherlands
[email protected] ABSTRACT Modern cloud infrastructure uses virtualization to isolate applications, optimize the utilization of hardware resources and provide operational flexibility. However, conventional virtualization comes at the cost of resource overhead. Container-based virtualization could be an alternative as it potentially reduces overhead and thus improves the uti- lization of datacenters. This paper presents the results of a marco-benchmark performance comparison between the two implementations of these technologies, namely Xen Figure 1. A schematic overview of virtual ma- and LXC, as well as a discussion on their operational flex- chines in a datacenter. ibility. Keywords et al. [7], expects hypervisors to provide isolation and portability. The Xen [4] hypervisor is a popular technol- Hypervisor, Virtualization, Cloud computing, Application ogy and widely used at the moment. infrastructure, LXC, Xen, Container-based virtualization With recent developments around Docker [2] and LXC [3] there now seems to be a viable alternative to the hyper- 1. INTRODUCTION visor and traditional virtualization for application infras- According to Zhang et al. [20] virtualization technology tructures. Linux Containers (LXC) is a kernel technol- is an essential part of modern cloud infrastructure, such ogy that is able to run a multitude of processes, each in as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google's their own isolated environment. This technique is called App Engine. These days, most cloud computing datacen- container-based virtualization. Docker is a tool that makes ters run hypervisors on top of their physical machines.