Abstract

Advancement of container technology (e.g. Docker, LXC, etc.) transformed the virtualization concept by providing a lightweight alternative to hypervisors. Docker has emerged as the most popular container management tool. Recent research regarding the comparison of container with hypervisor and bare-metal demonstrates that the container can accomplish bare-metal performance in almost all case. However, the current literature lacks an in-depth study on the experimental evaluation for understanding the performance interference between microservices that are hosted within a single or across multiple containers. In this paper, we have presented the experimental study on the performance evaluation of Docker containers running heterogeneous set of microservices concurrently. We have conducted a comprehensive set of experiments following CEEM (Cloud Evaluation Experiment Methodology) to measure the interference between containers running either competing or independent microservices. We have also considered the effects of constraining the resources of a container by explicitly specifying the cgroups. We have evaluated the performance of containers in terms of inter-container (caused by two concurrent executing containers) and intra-container (caused between two microservices executing inside a container) interference which is almost neglected in the current literature. The evaluation results can be utilized to model the interference effect for smart resource provisioning of microservices in the containerized environment.