A Lightweight Portable Multithreaded Client-Server Docker Containers

Abstract

In terms of diversity in operating systems, environments, and platforms, and with limited host infrastructure resources to hold all operating systems and platforms, the need arises to design applications that run in many or we can say in all operating systems and platforms. This paper deals with designing and implementing a lightweight multithreaded client-server application appears as a separate Docker container. Both client and server containers are based on alpine Linux and developed using Python programming language. The execution unit in the containers is Python program files. As a case study, the server acts as a Wikipedia server and it can serve many clients simultaneously. The Docker will build the containers depending on a writing Dockerfile for each container and push them to the registry (docker hub). When pulled the image of the containers from the registry account, then it could be run the container on a host. The proposed containerized multithreaded client-server model will become a portable with limited capabilities other than using Virtualization. Resources and cost requirements to achieve portability is evaluated for both virtualization and containerization paradigms. The results showed the superiority of containerization over the virtualization in both resources and cost requirements.