IBM Cloud Team, IBM Cloud (2020)- Containers Vs VMs: What’s the difference ?
<https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/containers-vs-vms>
This article explores virtualisation and containerisation.
The authors have given a brief overview of type 1 and type 2 virtualisation and its benefits and uses in the enterprise. They have also given a brief overview of containerisation and the benefits it has to offer to the enterprise. Both technologies aim to provide infinite flexibility and portability, agility and lower downtime.Since both technologies are mutually exclusive, it is possible to implement both virtualisation and containers in the same environment to achieve higher efficiencies and this article does briefly state this fact. The article is useful as it offers a good introduction into the two technologies which is the basis for this topic. (112 words).
Chaufornier Lucas, Sharma Prateek, Shenoy Prashant, Tay YCl (2016) Containers and Virtual Machines at Scale: A Comparative Study. Experimentation and Deployment Track Submission.
<https://people.cs.umass.edu/~prateeks/papers/mw_submitted.pdf>
This article introduces the concepts of Virtualisation and Containers and evaluates the two technologies from a data center perspective.The authors give a brief insight into hardware and operating system virtualisation and evaluate their performance against various scenarios such as resource allocation and resource isolation from a single server perspective, resource allocation from a cluster perspective, application development and deployment perspective and finally from a combination of both technologies. This article is useful for my research topic as it is well supported by baseline results but still lacks solid evidence on whether containers and virtualisation can co-exist successfully in an enterprise level environment. (103 words)
Strong Aaron (2019) Containerisation vs Virtualisation: What’s the difference ?
<https://www.burwood.com/blog-archive/containerization-vs-virtualization>
This article explores the concept of virtualisation and containers and briefly explains how they differ in their operations, characteristics and use cases.
The main ideas expressed by the author in this article are around virtualisation and containerisation (also referred to operating system virtualisation).He goes on to briefly list the advantages and disadvantages of both virtualisation technologies and concludes the article by stating that both technologies have a place in an enterprise IT strategy since neither of the 2 technologies are mutually exclusive.
The article is useful as it lists the advantages and disadvantages of both technologies but only briefly mentions how the existence of both could benefit an organisation. (110 words)
lias Mavridis, Helen Karatza, Combining containers and virtual machines to enhance isolation and extend functionality on cloud computing, Future Generation Computer Systems,Volume 94,2019,Pages 674-696,ISSN 0167-739X,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.12.035.
In this article the authors reviewed the usage of virtual machines and containers in the cloud, their performance and energy consumption and the benefits and drawbacks of using this approach. The main area of research was to combine the 2 virtualisation technologies by running containers inside virtual machines and and present the advantages of such a setup. Technologies from various vendors were used , benchmarks were executed and real world applications deployed to get realistic test results of running such a hybrid setup. This is a comprehensive research article which will benefit my research topic as it proves that hybrid virtualisation technology can in fact be beneficial.
Smimite, Oussama & Karim, Afdel. (2019). Impact of Hybrid Virtualization Using VM and Container on Live Migration and Cloud Performance.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91337-7_19.
In this article, the authors discuss the convergence of the 2 virtualisation technologies: namely hardware virtualisation and containers without degrading the quality of service of the infrastructure.This research article has examined the concept of virtual machine and container live migrations and described the difference between the two. The authors then introduce the concept of hybrid/converged virtualisation by nesting a container inside a virtual machine. Tests involving live migrations are then performed with various scenarios in a controlled environment and all relevant test results are captured.. This is a useful article for my own research topic as it has addressed the topic of hybrid virtualisation supported by documented results.
Zhang Q, Liu L, Pu C, Dou Q, Wu L, Zhou W (2018). A comparative study of containers and virtual machines in big data environments.
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.01842.pdf>
In this article the authors examine the work load capacity of containers and virtual machines using various Spark applications in a big data environment. The authors have presented an in depth experimental study between containers and virtual machines across areas such as convenience, scalability and the impact these two technologies have on big data. The study was concluded by stating containers are better easier to manage for administrators, are more scalable than virtual machines and achieve a higher CPU and memory utilisation.This article is relevant to my research topic as it provides an honest comparison of the 2 most popular technologies in use today and will assist the reader is making an informed decision about configuring their cloud environment. (120 words)
Amit M Potdar, Narayan D G, Shivaraj Kengond, Mohammed Moin Mulla, Performance Evaluation of Docker Container and Virtual Machine, Procedia Computer Science, Volume 171,2020, Pages 1419-1428, ISSN 1877-0509
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2020.04.152.
In this article, the authors examine performance evaluation of Docker containers and virtual machines. The authors have introduced the concept of virtualisation and containers. The emphasis is however purely on Docker containers and its performance against of virtual machines. Various tests are conducted and benchmarking tools such as Sysbench,Phoronix and Apache benmark are used to evaluate CPU performance, Memory throughput,Storage performance etc.The article concludes by stating Docker containers perform better than virtual machines across various test criteria.Though the article is useful, it is not a true indication of whether Docker containers in fact perform better as the tests which have been performed are not necessarily exhaustive. (110 words)
Chen Gary (2018). The Role of Virtualisation in the Era of Containers and Cloud, Sponsored by Red Hat
In this article, the author shares his opinion on why enterprises are now adopting containers for application development.
The author’s research focuses on the KVM hypervisor by Linux and how it is playing an important part in the innovation around cloud and containers. He goes on to state that containers will not replace virtualisation anytime soon and that in fact both technologies can co-exist within an enterprise since every application cannot be containerized.As a result, enterprises will need to adopt a converged platform to both virtual machines and containers since having both technologies in their respective silos is bound to create integration and management issues. This article is insightful since it states that both technologies can coexist but is biased towards the KVM hypervisor only. (126 words)
Farinich Jeff, Tindal Glen , Thiele Mark, Campbell Markl (2016). Hybrid Containers: The Middle Way between VM Technology and Disruptive Upheaval. Container Journal
In this article, the authors review the containerisation revolution and how it is disrupting technology and will it eventually replace virtualisation. The main ideas expressed here at that of containers and how despite still being in its infancy is picking up support at a pace no other technology has done so far. Its benefits lie mainly in the fact it can drastically improve the development process by enabling various teams to work more efficiently, eliminate environmental inconsistencies, reduce configuration complexity, all the while allowing for continuous integration. Though the article isn’t very detailed it will assist my research topic as the authors have raised the possibility of using a hybrid containerisation as a means to leverage the benefits of both traditional virtualisation and containers in the same enterprise. (128 words)
Morabito, Roberto & Kjällman, Jimmy & Komu, Miika. (2015). Hypervisors vs. Lightweight Virtualization: A Performance Comparison.
https://doi.org/10.1109/IC2E.2015.74.
This article examines the performance between hypervisor based virtualisation and lightweight virtualisation. The authors’ purpose is to conduct a thorough performance comparison between the 2 technologies using various benchmarking tools to measure CPU, Memory performance, disk I/O performance and Network I/O performance. The results of the tests seem to suggest that containers do present some advantages over virtualisation in terms of overhead but have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to management and security. The article is useful for my research topic however it does not clearly state which technology is better or whether both technologies can co-exist within the same enterprise. (104 words)
Cui, Z. (2020). Further investigation of the performance overhead for hypervisor- and container-based virtualization.
<https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9003143&fileOId=9004426>
In this article, the author has briefly discussed and researched the performance overhead of virtual machines and docker containers under certain test conditions. The author has introduced the concept of virtualisation with reference to the KVM and Xen hypervisor and container technologies with references to LXC (Linux Containers) and Docker. CPU, Memory, Disk and Network throughput is then compared using benchmarking tools and the results recorded. Though this article is very helpful towards my research topic, the concept of using both virtualisation and container technology within the same enterprise has only been briefly mentioned and not researched in greater details. (100 words).
Pollock Antonia. Virtualisation vs Containerisation
<https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/virtualization-vs-containerization/>
This article discusses the virtualisation and container technologies and very briefly mentions the concept of hybrid virtualisation. The author has compared the 2 technologies based on a number of criteria including speed, hardware resources, security and isolation, application sharing and application lifecycle. The report concludes with a brief mention of hybrid solutions which is where containerisation and virtualisation can be used together. This is a fairly current article which describes the 2 most common virtualisation technologies and will be beneficial to my research topic, however it does not go into great detail on hybrid virtualisation technology other than just presenting some points of comparisons. (104 words)