Comparing Containers versus Virtual Machines for Achieving High Availability

Abstract

In recent decades, virtualization as an abstraction from physical hardware has become a popular solution to resource isolation and server consolidation. With the surge in adoption of virtualization technologies, ensuring High Availability (HA) for applications hosted in virtualized environments emerges as an important problem and has garnered substantial attention. In this paper, we present a brief comparison of virtualization technologies from a HA perspective. The state-of-the-art HA solutions in two mainstream types of virtualized platforms (i.e., hypervisor-based platform and container-based platform) are respectively investigated in terms of limitations and features such as live migration, failure detection, and checkpoint/ restore. One of our key findings is that, compared with hypervisor-based platforms, HA features in container-based platforms are far from enough. From a HA perspective, extensions on top of container technologies are required.