A Functional and Performance Benchmark of Lightweight Virtualization Platforms for Edge Computing

The recent rise of edge computing and FaaS triggered a revolution in the field of software virtualization, improving performance and security. This paper benchmarks various lightweight virtualization platforms, such as microVMs and containers, in the context of edge microservices. Factors taken into account include toolchain maturity, networking capabilities, boot time, resource use, microservice performance, and ARM architecture readiness. We present a functional comparison and benchmarks on both a Raspberry Pi 4 and an x86-64 platform. The results indicate standard Docker containers offer reliable performance and low memory use, while microVM-based solutions such as Firecracker are more isolated. Moreover, OSv unikernels have extremely low boot times and significantly better performance than Docker containers. Finally, while gVisor offers improved security and excellent compatibility, its performance is only 10% of default Docker performance.

I. Introduction

The rise of edge computing and FaaS has triggered a revolution in the field of virtualization, in an attempt to offer improved performance and useful features for a variety of use cases. While virtual machines (VMs) and containers used to be the only available technologies, recent developments have resulted in various types of microVMs, isolation layers, and mixed technology that borrows features from both containers and VMs.