Differences in performance between containerization & virtualization : With a focus on HTTP requests

Containerization and virtualization are two of the keystones of cloud computing. Neither technologies are a new invention but did not become widely used until it regained popularity through new implementations. Virtualization regained popularity with the founding of VMWare, and containerization has become vastly popular in the last decade with Docker. When using a service from a Cloud Service Provider today, that service will more than likely be utilizing one of these technologies. This study aims to compare the performance of these two technologies when being used to host an API and how they utilize their provided hardware resources to handle HTTP requests.A series of load tests were conducted on an API developed and hosted on the two technologies to measure the hardware performance, response time and throughput of each technology.Hyper-V was used for virtualization, and Docker was used for containerization. Data was collected on resource utilization, response time, and throughput. The data was also compared to related research to validate it.The results of the experiment showed that, in our implementation, virtualization was superior to containerization in every measured aspect.We conclude that containerization has a bottleneck in the implementation we chose that impedes the container's network performance, which results in the container not being able to process as many HTTP requests as the virtualized environment.The number of processed HTTP requests for the container in relation to CPU usage is superior to that of the virtualized environment, which leads us to believe that it could be possible that the container would be superior if not for the network performance