Migrating VM Workloads to Containers: Issues and Challenges

Virtualization technologies such as KVM and XEN have served the purpose of workload consolidation while providing required isolation. With the advent of Linux Docker platform, micro-service architectures have gained popularity. Adaptation of containers have changed the way, the applications are architected, developed, deployed and managed. Compared to Virtualization, containers provide lightweight alternative to co-host multiple applications on single server at the cost of isolation. This paper highlights the issues and challenges associated with migrating VM based workloads to Container platforms. A systematic analysis, illustrated through a representative application benchmark chosen from a real-life e-commerce private cloud setup is used to present these aspects. Specifically, the application workflow that is currently hosted on VMs is chosen and re-casted on to containers platform and a critical study is conducted based on resource sharing, concurrency, isolation and dependability parameters.