[Beowulf] Docker vs KVM paper by IBM

[Prentice Bisbal]

It's amazing what you can get published. Those results seem pretty 
obvious to me.

On 01/21/2015 04:26 PM, Andrew Holway wrote:
> *yawn*
>
> On 19 August 2014 at 18:16, Kilian Cavalotti
> <kilian.cavalotti.work at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 7:10 AM, Douglas Eadline <deadline at eadline.org> wrote:
>>> I ran across this interesting paper by IBM:
>>>    An Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers
>> It's an interesting paper, but I kind of feel it's comparing apple to
>> oranges. They're both round and tasty, but it's not really the same
>> thing.
>>
>> There's probably no need to detail this, but KVM is a virtualization
>> infrastructure that run full stack OSes (using their own kernels) on
>> top of a Linux kernel turned into an hypervisor. So yes, it carries
>> the overhead of running a kernel over a kernel, but also the
>> flexibility of doing so (ie. you can run different kernel/OS versions
>> on top of each other, use virtual devices and so on).
>> Docker, on the other hand, is a containerization infrastructure that
>> run processes on top of an existing, regular kernel. Not to diminish
>> its merits, which are great in many areas, but it's closer to a kind
>> of glorified chroot.
>>
>> So, it's no surprise that Docker performance would be the same as the
>> underlying OS's, while KVM overhead is much more important. There's a
>> full layer of virtualization difference between the two.
>>
>> And they also a ran single VM or container per host. It would probably
>> also be interesting to see what happens when your run multiple VMs or
>> multiple containers on the same host.
>>
>> I guess it's nice somebody took the time to do the test, to ensure
>> that Docker management or the LXC infrastructure was not impacting the
>> containers performance too much, but I'm not sure I really understand
>> the goal of the paper. Worst case, it will probably be misleading for
>> people who will end up comparing two different tools with very
>> different purposes and use cases. "What do you mean I can not upgrade
>> the kernel in my container?"
>>
>> Cheers,
>> --
>> Kilian
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-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Manager of Information Technology
Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2)
Rutgers University
http://rdi2.rutgers.edu