Virtualization in Cloud Computing: Moving from Hypervisor to Containerization—A Survey

Containers emerged as a lightweight alternative to virtual machines that offer better microservice architecture support. They are widely used by organizations to deploy their increasingly diverse workloads derived from modern applications such as big data, IoT, and edge/fog computing in either proprietary clusters or private, public cloud data centers. With the growing interest in container-based virtualization technologies, the requirement to explore the deployment and orchestration of clusters of containers has become a central research problem. Although progress has been made to study containerization, systematic consolidation of the existing literature with a summative evaluation is still missing. To fill this gap, in this paper, we first taxonomically classify the existing research studies on the performance comparison between hypervisor and container technology and then analyze state-of-the-art for container cluster management orchestration systems, its performance monitoring tools, and finally future research trends. This results in a better understanding of container technology with attention to provide summative analysis in terms of (i) how much performance overhead is generated by a hypervisor compared to container-based virtualization, (ii) which container technology is suited for a cloud application deployment based on the type of benchmark executing, (iii) how to provide management of containers deployed in a cluster environment, (iv) container performance monitoring tools, and (v) finally emerging concerns for future research directions.