Virtualization and containerization: a new concept for data center management to optimize resources distribution

Abstract

The role of cloud computing has led the way data center services are offered, utilized and handled over the internet. Typically, applications run inside the virtual machines in an isolated environment. Nevertheless, a considerable hardware virtualization overhead seems to be inevitable. Recently, Docker containers have gained noticeable attention because of their substantially lower overhead if compared to virtual machines using operating system virtualization. This prominent technology mainly provides isolation, portability, interoperability, scalability and high availability. Hence that is being widely adopted and everybody is trying to shift their software to Docker containers with the support of tools and frameworks.

Containers are revolutionizing the way software is delivered and deployed. Particularly with the use of cloud orchestration tools like Kubernetes, a new approach to high availability and fault tolerance is emerging.

The thesis illustrates the evolution of virtualization technology and the switch to containerization, to focus on the migration of data center processes in a containerized environment using Kubernetes as an orchestration tool. Two case examples are discussed in order to evaluate the performance of a web server and a file server. In addition to that, a cost/benefits analysis is introduced to estimate the advantages such a strategy could lead to.