PINE: Optimizing Performance Isolation in Container Environments

With the development of virtualization technologies, containers are widely used to provide a light-weight isolated runtime environment. Compared with virtual machines, containers can achieve high-resource utilization and provide a more convenient way of sharing, but there are significant security challenges due to potential resource contention among services. When the regular services that share the storage system with the key services are over-used, a lot of resources may be preempted, which breakdowns the whole system and delays other services. This paper addressed the performance isolation in fierce resource competition situations, that is, when different services (latency-sensitive services and throughput-first services) are deployed on a host machine using container technology. We proposed PINE, a performance isolation optimization solution in container environments, which can adaptively allocate the storage resource for each service according to their performance behaviors through dynamical resource management and I/O concurrency configuration. The experimental results show that PINE can effectively optimize the performance of the running services and achieve the optimal result in a relatively short time.