Use of containerisation as an alternative to full virtualisation in grid environments.

Abstract

Virtualisation is a key tool on the grid. It can be used to provide varying work environments or as part of a cloud infrastructure. Virtualisation itself carries certain overheads that decrease the performance of the system through requiring extra resources to virtualise the software and hardware stack, and CPU-cycles wasted instantiating or destroying virtual machines for each job. With the rise and improvements in containerisation, where only the software stack is kept separate and no hardware or kernel virtualisation is used, there is scope for speed improvements and efficiency increases over standard virtualisation. We compare containerisation and virtualisation, including a comparison against bare-metal machines as a benchmark.