Performance comparison between container-based and VM-based services

These days, microservice architecture is widely used in the design and development of many real-time, critical, and large-scale online services. These services are typically deployed using Docker containers on cloud platforms. Container technology supports the deployment of these services with high portability, scalability, and performance, when compared to deploying them using virtual machines (i.e. VM-based services). It is widely known fact that container-based services give better performance than VM-based services. However, we show in this paper that services deployed using Amazon AWS ECS (EC2 Container Service) surprisingly perform significantly worse when compared with services deployed using Amazon EC2 VMs. We study and quantify the performance difference in terms of throughput, response time and CPU utilization considering different deployment scenarios.