Ultimately, the study from Virginia Tech concludes, advances in container technology have considerable potential to lead to widespread improvements in cloud computing performance. This stems from management tools for cloud-based light-weight virtual machine replacements termed ‘containers’.
By utilizing the cloud computers have become more efficient, able to access information from virtual machines and enabling software to launch quickly on demand and for files to be speedily extracted. Speed and efficiency need not stop here, however. Virginia Tech researchers have found new ways to improve computing efficiency through the use of containers. these are frameworks that permit the microservices that power data retrieval from the ‘cloud’ to be deployed in a far more agile manner.
In contrast to software-heavy machines, containers share the core of the underlying operating system. The net effect is to trigger faster deployment of software programs with no loss of performance.
This technology remains at an early stage, according to lead researcher Dr. Ali Anwar, who says: “Containers are just now being studied as part of the cloud infrastructure, but our research indicates that how they function in the cloud is critical to developing and distributing future computer systems that maximize efficiency.”
Dr. Anwar’s research was on a container management framework called Docker. This is a a solution used to build, ship and deploy applications in containers. So far the researchers have looked at five geographically distributed data centers, over a 75 day period. This spanned 38 million requests and 181.3 TB of traces. The outcome was of improved efficiency and performance compared with conventional cloud technology.
The new development was showcased at FAST’18, the 16th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, which took place in California in February 2018.
