A holistic evaluation of docker containers for interfering microservices

Advancement of container technology (e.g. Docker,LXC, etc.) transformed the virtualization concept by providinga lightweight alternative to hypervisors. Docker has emergedas the most popular container management tool. Recentresearch regarding the comparison of container withhypervisor and bare-metal demonstrates that the container canaccomplish bare-metal performance in almost all case.However, the current literature lacks an in-depth study on theexperimental evaluation for understanding the performanceinterference between microservices that are hosted within asingle or across multiple containers. In this paper, we havepresented the experimental study on the performanceevaluation of Docker containers running heterogeneous set ofmicroservices concurrently. We have conducted acomprehensive set of experiments following CEEM (CloudEvaluation Experiment Methodology) to measure theinterference between containers running either competing orindependent microservices. We have also considered the effectsof constraining the resources of a container by explicitlyspecifying the cgroups. We have evaluated the performance ofcontainers in terms of inter-container (caused by twoconcurrent executing containers) and intra-container (causedbetween two microservices executing inside a container)interference which is almost neglected in the current literature.The evaluation results can be utilized to model the interferenceeffect for smart resource provisioning of microservices in thecontainerized environment.