The Art of CPU-Pinning: Evaluating and Improving the Performance of Virtualization and Containerization Platforms

Cloud providers offer a variety of execution platforms in form of bare-metal, VM, and containers. However, due to the pros and cons of each execution platform, choosing the appropriate platform for a specific cloud-based application has become a challenge for solution architects. The possibility to combine these platforms (e.g. deploying containers within VMs) offers new capacities that makes the challenge even further complicated. However, there is a little study in the literature on the pros and cons of deploying different application types on various execution platforms. In particular, evaluation of diverse hardware configurations and different CPU provisioning methods, such as CPU pinning, have not been sufficiently studied in the literature. In this work, the performance overhead of container, VM, and bare-metal execution platforms are measured and analyzed for four categories of real-world applications, namely video processing, parallel processing (MPI), web processing, and No-SQL, respectively representing CPU intensive, parallel processing, and two IO intensive processes. Our analyses reveal a set of interesting and sometimes counterintuitive findings that can be used as best practices by the solution architects to efficiently deploy cloud-based applications. Here are some notable mentions: (A) Under specific circumstances, containers can impose a higher overhead than VMs; (B) Containers on top of VMs can mitigate the overhead of VMs for certain applications; (C) Containers with a large number of cores impose a lower overhead than those with a few cores.