Cloud benchmarking in bare-metal, virtualized, and containerized execution environments

Cloud data centers rely on virtualization to increase their productivity and reduce complexity for end users while delivering access on-demand as a service. Because virtualization involves increased abstraction, there is an inevitable trade-off between virtualization and potential performance degradation. As a result, there has been a considerable amount of work in developing and improving different virtualized environments that can isolate a workload from another. Virtual machines and Linux containers are the most well-known techniques that provide an isolated environment to allow applications to run independently. Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages. This research aims to compare the performance of systems in bare-metal, containerized (Linux containers), and virtualized (virtual machines) execution environments. It also analyzes and understands the implications of the benchmarking results in these different execution environments. The benchmarking results, analyses, and insights discussed can provide a guidance to cloud computing researchers and developers in the process of designing cloud computing solutions, deploying cloud systems, and developing algorithms, programs, and applications on different cloud platforms.