Comparison of High performance I/O solutions in a docker based virtual environment

Abstract: Containerisation has gained increasing popularity inthe software industry over other virtualization technologies forthe past few years in a drive to reduce the costs such asmaintenance. While providing many benefits, containerisedsystems may nevertheless suffer from an increased cost of I/Operformance in comparison to a non-containerised system. Thisstudy thus focuses on approaches to achieve high-performanceI/O Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) between containers.Experiments were conducted in a Docker environment deployedon a Linux host machine. Network sockets(TCP/UDP) andshared-memory were tested as means of communication betweencontainers. PPS (packets per second) is used as an indicator formeasuring performance. The results demonstrates a substantialdifference in PPS among shared memory, TCP and UDP. Futurework could include other possible solutions such as DPDK incombination with SR-IOV and Unix domain socket.