Virtualized Containers: Performance

It is always fun to watch pundits and industry analysts proclaim the death of this technology or that technology.  This is something that happens regularly enough that it's become a bit of a sport.

In my case, because I work at VMware, I often get told that containerization is the end of virtualization.  This is a very interesting contention that doesn't seem to be based on any sort of factual evidence.  The conversation usually starts out with me showing our new Photon Platform or vSphere Integrated Containers (vIC) product.  Fundamentally, both of these products allow you to run containers on ESXi.  vIC allows you to run Docker naively in vSphere and Photon Platform is a new platform for running containers and cloud native workloads.  Or to put it another way, they allow you to virtualize your containers.  After I show the demo, there's a polite pause.  Then comes "the question" that I always expect.  They ask "Why would I want to virtualize my containers?  Everyone knows that containers run best on bare metal."

The really fun part is that when you press, there really isn't any sort of basis for the assertion.  Mostly, the objection seems to come down to performance.  They want to run containers on bare metal Linux because "it's faster."  Again, we ask what that assertion is based on.  The really clever folks will Google it for you and usually come up with this paper from IBM.  While this paper is fascinating and very well researched and documented, there is one fatal flaw:  it's based on KVM.  What IBM is really saying is that bare metal containers are faster than KVM.  Well, OK.  I'll let the KVM folks answer that one.  I don't work on KVM, I work on ESXi.  The thing is, we know that ESXi is significantly faster than KVM for some workloads.  See this or this.  So, what does that mean?  It means that we don't actually know anything based on this report.

Thankfully, VMware has done their own research.  They have found that in smaller workloads, there is very little virtualization overhead for ESXi.  In an interesting development, they also found that some workloads like Redis, actually run FASTER when you virtualize them.

So, where does the truth lie?  As is usually the case, your mileage will vary.  If performance is a key issue for you, test your workload and draw your own conclusions.

Just don't tell me that "everyone knows" that containers run slower when virtualized.  That just ain't so.