A Microservice-Based Architecture for Performance and Energy Benchmarking of Docker-Host Linux Distributions on Internet-of-Things Devices

Containers are rapidly being adopted in several areas of the information technology industry. A major area is edge and embedded Internet-of-Things systems. In this paper, we present a microservice-based architecture for performance analysis and energy consumption of Internet-of-Things "Docker host" Linux distributions. Our methodology builds on previous container benchmarking work, with analysis of performance metrics such as processing, memory, and disk throughput. Furthermore, our methodology introduces container-engine performance metrics related to container lifecycle operations, and concurrent container performance. We demonstrate by comparing four Linux distributions in this domain: BalenaOS, HypriotOS, RancherOS, and Raspbian Lite. All source code is provided.