Assessing Containerized REST Services Performance in the Presence of Operator Faults

Service applications are increasingly being deployed in virtualized environments, such as virtual machines (VMs) as a means to provide elasticity and to allow fast recovery from failures. The recent trend is now to deploy applications in containers (e.g., Docker or RKT containers), which allow, among many other benefits, to further reduce recovery time, since containers are much more lightweight than VMs. Although several performance benchmarks exist for web services (e.g., TPC-App and SPEC SPECjEnterprise2010) or even virtualized environments (e.g., SPEC Cloud IaaS 2016, TPCx-V), understanding the behavior of containerized services in the presence of faults has been generally disregarded. This paper proposes an experimental approach for evaluating the performance of containerized services in presence of operator faults. The approach is based on the injection of a simple set of operator faults targeting the containers and middleware. Results show noticeable differences regarding the impact of operator faults in Docker and RKT, with the latter one allowing for faster recovery, despite showing the lowest throughput.