A Quantitative Cross-Comparison of Container Networking Technologies for Virtualized Service Infrastructures in Local Computing Environments

Container networking is emerging as a game-changer paradigm for the deployment of virtualized service infrastructures in a faster and reliable way. Nevertheless, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are still skeptical to revise their business in this direction because of the absence of deep studies showing its effectiveness in real deployments leveraging local computing environments. To bridge this gap, this article presents a quantitative cross-comparison of cutting-edge technologies for container networking (including Docker as a container engine, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes as orchestrators, bare-metal and OpenStack cloud as deployment platform), properly integrated to realize a virtualized service infrastructure within a commercial workstation. Initial experimental tests are conducted to identify the most suitable combination of technologies for high-load environments, where many clients contact the virtualized service infrastructure to download files of large size. Obtained results demonstrate that the combination of Docker and Kubernetes generally ensures better performance on the bare-metal deployment platform, thus emerging as mature and effective solutions to be used by SMEs. Finally, the behavior of the identified virtualized service infrastructure is also evaluated in a smart farm use case, where containers are in charge of processing images provided by mobile drones for monitoring purposes. In addition, in this case, the conducted study highlights the promising capability offered by container networking in real deployments, exploiting local computing environments.