Performance Analysis of Virtual Machines and Docker Containers

Abstract

Cloud computing is a good paradigm which utilizes virtualization technology to isolate the workloads from one another as well as elastic in nature. Cloud providers possessing multiples of Virtual Machines (VM) to perform the full functionality demanded by the users. Meanwhile, Docker based containers emerged with upgraded performance than VMs. Cloud provider scales up the economic benefits during peak demands for its infrastructure. At the same time it is a taxing issue for the cloud provider to ensure quality of service (QoS) for the clients. By considering all these factors cloud provider can replace VMs by Docker Containers so that overall profit is increased. In this paper we exploit the outstanding performance of the Docker containers in terms of throughput, average response time etc., Here we made a performance test for VM and Docker Container in the same cloud provider namely Amazon Web Service (AWS). To compare the performance of VM and Docker container, a cloud monitoring service called Datadog Agent is integrated with both remote servers to monitor the functionality of resources and an open source testing software tool namely Apache JMeter is employed to perform a load test. The experimental results obtained proves that Docker Container outperforms VMs in almost all metrics.