ElBench: a microbenchmark to evaluate virtual machine and container strategies on executing elastic applications in the cloud

摘要

One of the main features of cloud computing is the elasticity of resources. Virtual machines (VMs) are the typical implementation of this feature since they offer mechanisms for replication and isolation. In addition to VMs, today we perceive the emergence of the container technology to implement these facilities; however, our investigation did not list an initiative that describes a comparison formalism to evaluate both techniques to run HPC elastic applications in the cloud. This article explores this gap, presenting a microbenchmark named ElBench, which focuses on providing a framework to compare VM and container on executing elastic parallel applications in the cloud. Using AutoElastic, a middleware to run elastic parallel applications in the cloud, a scientific application and two workloads, ElBench methodology generated results in favour of containers: on average, compared to VMs they provide a gain of 20% in the execution time and 60% savings in terms of cost.