Comparative Study of Containers and Virtual Machines

Alex Yu

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the efforts made to recreate results from two
comparative studies on the performance of containers and virtual
machines by Felter et al. and Sharma et al.  The main contribution of
this paper is an evaluation of the performance of containers and VMs
in multiple aspects, using a suite of workloads that stress CPU and
memory. The paper uses Docker and VirtualBox as representative
containers and VMs, respectively. The results are consistent with that
of the other two studies, demonstrating that the performance of
containers is better than VMs in almost all cases and rivals in that
of bare-metal environments in most cases as well.