The increasing adoption of cloud computing is strongly influenced by emerging of technologies whose aim is to improve the development and deployment processes of enterprise applications. The goal of this thesis is to investigate one of these solutions, called “containerization”, and deeply analyze how this solution can be included in cloud infrastructures as an alternative to complementary solutions like virtual machines. So far, the virtual machine model has been the predominant solution. The key differentiator nature that containers offer has stimulated an increasing adoption of this technology because improves resource management, resource sharing, and it guarantees substantial improvements regarding provisioning time of single instances.
In this work, we will analyze the containerization paradigm from both infrastructure and application point of views. For the first one, we will investigate the performances by comparing LXD, Docker, and KVM, as hypervisor of OpenStack cloud infrastructure, while the second one concerns the development of enterprise applications that are distributed over a set of server hosts. In this case, we need to exploit high-level services such as orchestration. Therefore, we will compare the performances of the following container orchestrators: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, and Cattle.
Authors: Amedeo Palopoli