Container-Based Performance Evaluation: A Survey and Challenges

Virtualization is an expanding technology in all areas of research and development. It has been widely accepted because of characteristics such as elasticity and flexibility in delivering on-demand resources. Nowadays, containers are a new form of virtualization and they have been highlighted as large technology companies are giving more support to them. Containers are a type of OS-level virtualization, in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated instances. This paper presents a survey of recent research and challenges involving containers, focusing on performance evaluation. To achieve this goal, we performed a systematic mapping considering the main databases (Springer, IEEE, ACM, and Scopus), raising the challenges of the area and prospects of future work, considering the recent use of containers. We have observed that there is still little research related to performance evaluation of containers and we consider this topic very important since performance is fundamental to the design and adoption of projects.