Performance comparison between hypervisor- and container-based virtualizations for cloud users

To outsourcing their services to public clouds, cloud users should understand the performance of various virtualization technologies so that they can choose suitable cloud on which to deploy their services, as various cloud providers use different virtualization technologies. In this paper, we compare the performance between a representative hypervisor-based virtualization, Xen, and a very popular container-based virtualization, Docker. We use extensive micro-benchmarks to compare virtualization overheads of various components on a host system between these two virtualization technologies, and two macro-benchmarks, HPL, a case of high performance computing applications, and YCSB, a case of online transaction processing applications, to study on virtualization impact on real-world applications. We found that although the virtualization overheads of Xen are much higher than that of Docker on latencies of host systems and both of virtualization solutions have few impacts on bandwidths overall, Xen has comparable, more, and less overheads than Docker for HPL, YCSB in term of transaction latency under certain loads, and YCSB in term of transaction throughput, respectively.