Understanding the performance of container execution environments

Many application server backends leverage container technologies to support workloads formed of short-lived, but potentially I/O-intensive, operations. The latency at which container-supported operations complete impacts both the users' experience and the throughput that the platform can achieve. This latency is a result of both the bootstrap and execution time of the containers and is impacted greatly by the performance of the I/O subsystem. Configuring appropriately the container environment and technology stack to obtain good performance is not an easy task, due to the variety of options, and poor visibility on their interactions. We present in this paper a benchmarking tool for the multi-parametric study of container bootstrap time and I/O performance, allowing us to understand such interactions within a controlled environment. We report the results obtained by evaluating a large number of environment configurations. Our conclusions highlight differences in support and performance between container runtime environments and I/O subsystems.