Virtualization and Containerization of Application Infrastructure : A Comparison

Modern cloud infrastructure uses virtualization to isolate applications, optimize the utilization of hardware resources and provide operational flexibility. However, conventional virtualization comes at the cost of resource overhead. Container-based virtualization could be an alternative as it potentially reduces overhead and thus improves the utilization of datacenters. This paper presents the results of a marco-benchmark performance comparison between the two implementations of these technologies, namely Xen and LXC, as well as a discussion on their operational flexibility.

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