Comparison of Containerization and Virtualization in Cloud Architectures

Virtualization and Containerization both come with several advantages and disadvantages, mostly over each other. As these are both used for a varied range of applications and are used for different purposes, choosing one over another can be of significant importance. While there are several literary works that provide the broad differences between virtualization and containerization, this work focuses on the performance differences in the 3 cloud architectures- IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The results obtained in this work are a step towards gauging the differences between containerization and virtualization and to allow users of these services to appropriately decide their method of operation, by providing clear, quantifiable points of difference between these 2 methods, across the cloud architectures. This work found that while containers can be more efficient in their performance for SaaS and PaaS offerings, the parameters measured are nearly identical for IaaS offerings