Benchmarking Container Engines with a Networking Perspective

The growth of distributed applications stand on a foundation of containers and their communication and have seen the rise and fall of many implementations throughout the years with a mix of proprietary and open sources. Today there are two implementations widely used as a result of the popularity of the huge project Kubernetes: CRI-O and Containerd. Both with the edge responsibility of managing containers using similar underlying software raising the question; do they have any implications on the containers they spawn? This thesis investigate these implementations from a performance perspective with a custom developed tool for direct communication to them and run a suite of benchmarks within the containers created by each. The suite consists of tests for throughput, latency, cpu, memory, random file read/write and sequential file read/write. Results conclude they perform similarly in all, but the file tests which showed overall CRI-O dominating in write speed and Containerd dominating the read speed