Performance and Overhead Study of Containers Running on Top of Virtual Machines

Cloud computing is a widespread and commonly used computing paradigm. Cloud relied on virtualization technology to be a scalable and efficient distributed system. In traditional cloud infrastructures, hypervisors like KVM create and manage Virtual Machines according to users' demands. Recently a more lightweight virtualization technique is being rapidly adopted and it is based on containers. Although running a container on top of Virtual Machine is a common case, according to our research it has never been studied before how this affects the container's performance. In this work, we conducted several experiments to study how the container performance is affected by the additional virtualization layer of the Virtual Machine. We used Docker to deploy and run our containers, KVM hypervisor for the Virtual Machines and we executed a series of well-known benchmarks on different operating systems.