A Performance Comparison of Cloud-Based Container Orchestration Tools

Compared to the traditional approach of using virtual machines as the basis for the development and deployment of applications running in Cloud-based infrastructures, container technology provides developers with a higher degree of portability and availability, allowing developers to build and deploy their applications in a much more efficient and flexible manner. A number of tools have been proposed to orchestrate complex applications comprising multiple containers requiring continuous monitoring and management actions to meet application-oriented and non-functional requirements. Different container orchestration tools provide different features that incur different overheads. As such, it is not always easy for developers to choose the orchestration tool that will best suit their needs. In this paper we compare the benefits and overheads incurred by the most popular open source container orchestration tools currently available, namely: Kubernetes and Docker in Swarm mode. We undertake a number of benchmarking exercises from well-known benchmarking tools to evaluate the performance overheads of container orchestration tools and identify their pros and cons more generally. The results show that the overall performance of Kubernetes is slightly worse than that of Docker in Swarm mode. However, Docker in Swarm mode is not as flexible or powerful as Kubernetes in more complex situations.