Performance Evaluation of Container Runtimes

Lennart Espe, Anshul Jindal, Vladimir Podolskiy, Michael Gerndt

2020

Abstract

The co-location of containers on the same host leads to significant performance concerns in the multi-tenant environment such as the cloud. These concerns are raised due to an attempt to maximize host resource utilization by increasing the number of containers running on the same host. The selection of a container runtime becomes critical in the case of strict performance requirements. In the scope of the study, two commonly used runtimes were evaluated: containerd (industry standard) and CRI-O (reference implementation of the CRI) on two different Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtimes: runc (default for most container runtimes) and gVisor (highly secure alternative to runc). Evaluation aspects of container runtimes include the performance of running containers, the performance of container runtime operations, and scalability. A tool called TouchStone was developed to address these evaluation aspects. The tool uses the CRI standard and is pluggable into any Kubernetes-compatible container runtime. Performance results demonstrate the better performance of containerd in terms of CPU usage, memory latency and scalability aspects, whereas file system operations (in particular, write operations) are performed more efficiently by CRI-O.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Espe L., Jindal A., Podolskiy V. and Gerndt M. (2020). Performance Evaluation of Container Runtimes.In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER, ISBN 978-989-758-424-4, pages 273-281. DOI: 10.5220/0009340402730281

in Bibtex Style

@conference{closer20,
author={Lennart Espe and Anshul Jindal and Vladimir Podolskiy and Michael Gerndt},
title={Performance Evaluation of Container Runtimes},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,},
year={2020},
pages={273-281},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009340402730281},
isbn={978-989-758-424-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science - Volume 1: CLOSER,
TI - Performance Evaluation of Container Runtimes
SN - 978-989-758-424-4
AU - Espe L.
AU - Jindal A.
AU - Podolskiy V.
AU - Gerndt M.
PY - 2020
SP - 273
EP - 281
DO - 10.5220/0009340402730281