Experimental Evaluation of Software Aging Effects in a Container-Based Virtualization Platform

Cloud-based architectures have grown in recent years, especially the interest in container-based solutions have sharply increased by enterprises worldwide. Containers are a form of lightweight virtualization that can be used to provide cloud services. Adopting this kind of technology in a bare- metal context is becoming strong because they can offer many benefits, like performance efficiency and costs reduction. Docker is a widespread platform for the creation and management of containers. As in any computational cloud service, Docker environments must deal with the intensive workload and may have a long-term life cycle, which might trigger some problems that compromise the system dependability. The software aging phenomenon is one of these likely problems. It is a process of cumulative errors or system misbehavior that leads to application failures and performance degradation throughout its runtime. This paper aims to monitor and evaluate software aging effects on the Docker platform in a cloud computing environment. We conducted two experimental studies with automated workloads to simulate containers' life cycle and the intensive use of Docker features, while the system was monitored. The results show high resource consumption by the operating system's network utility, in addition to memory fragmentation in the sub-processes of the Docker platform. Trends of increasing resident memory consumption were also observed in one of these scenarios.