An updated performance comparison of virtual machines and Linux containers

TLDR

Cloud computing relies on virtual machines for isolation and resource control, but both VMs and containers need tuning to support I/O‑intensive workloads. The study investigates VM versus container performance and discusses implications for future cloud architectures. The authors compare KVM‑based VMs with Docker containers. Containers achieve equal or better performance than VMs in nearly all tested scenarios.

Abstract

Cloud computing makes extensive use of virtual machines because they permit workloads to be isolated from one another and for the resource usage to be somewhat controlled. In this paper, we explore the performance of traditional virtual machine (VM) deployments, and contrast them with the use of Linux containers. We use KVM as a representative hypervisor and Docker as a container manager. Our results show that containers result in equal or better performance than VMs in almost all cases. Both VMs and containers require tuning to support I/Ointensive applications. We also discuss the implications of our performance results for future cloud architectures.