Kubernetes in Action: Exploring the Performance of Kubernetes Distributions in the Cloud
Hossein Aqasizade, Ehsan Ataie, Mostafa Bastam · Software Practice and Experience · 2025
ABSTRACT Background Kubernetes has emerged as a leading open‐source platform for container orchestration, enabling organizations to efficiently manage and deploy containerized applications at scale. This paper investigates the performance of four Kubernetes distributions—Kubeadm, K3s, MicroK8s, and K0s—when running OpenFaaS as a containerized service on a cluster of computing nodes in CloudLab. Methods To achieve this, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of two virtualization modes, HVM and PV, supported by Xen as the underlying hypervisor. Additionally, two container runtimes integrated with Kubernetes, Docker, and Containerd, are examined to assess their performance in both disk‐intensive and CPU‐intensive workloads. After determining the optimal Xen virtualization mode and container runtime, the Kubernetes distributions are deployed, and their performance is measured using various metrics, including request rate, CPU utilization, and scaling behavior. Results The findings reveal that Xen PV mode outperforms Xen HVM in both disk and CPU performance. Docker surpasses Containerd in runtime efficiency for both workload types, and K3s exhibits superior scalability and CPU utilization among the evaluated Kubernetes distributions. Conclusions These results provide critical insights for selecting optimal virtualization configurations, container runtimes, and Kubernetes distributions to maximize performance in containerized environments.