Evaluation of Container Orchestration Systems for Deploying and Managing NoSQL Database Clusters

Container orchestration systems, such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, provide automated support for deployment and management of distributed applications as sets of containers. While these systems were initially designed for running load-balanced stateless services, they have also been used for running database clusters because of improved resilience attributes such as fast auto-recovery of failed database nodes, and location transparency at the level of TCP/IP connections between database instances. In this paper we evaluate the performance overhead of Docker Swarm and Kubernetes for deploying and managing NoSQL database clusters, with MongoDB as database case study. As the baseline for comparison, we use an OpenStack IaaS cloud that also allows attaining these improved resilience attributes although in a less automated manner.