A Performance Evaluation of Containers Running on Managed Kubernetes Services
Arnaldo Pereira Ferreira, Richard Sinnott · 2019
Container-based virtualisation technologies are gaining more and more traction in recent years across Cloud platforms and this will likely continue in the coming years. As such, containers orchestration technologies are becoming indispensable. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard because of its robustness, maturity and rich features. To free users of the burden of having to configure and maintain complex Kubernetes infrastructures, but still make use of its functionalities, all major Cloud providers are now offering cloud-native managed Kubernetes alternatives. The goal of this paper is to investigate the performance of containers running in such hosted services. For this purpose, we conduct a series of experimental evaluations of containers to monitor the behaviour of system resources including CPU, memory, disk and network. A baseline consisting of a manually deployed Kubernetes cluster was built for comparison. In particular, we consider the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The Australia-wide NeCTAR Research Cloud was used for the baseline.