Migrating from Virtualization to Dockerization in the Cloud: Simulation and Evaluation of Distributed Systems

Virtualization is the nucleus of the cloud computing for providing its services on-demand. Cloud-based distributed systems are predominantly developed using virtualization technology. However, the requirement of significant resources and issues of interoperability and deployment make it less adoptable in the development of many types of distributed systems. Dockerization or Docker Container-based virtualization has been introduced in the last three years and gaining popularity in the software development community. Docker has recently introduced its distributed system development tool called Swarm, which extends the Docker Container-based system development process on multiple hosts in multiple clouds. Docker Swarm-based containerized distributed system is a brand new approach and needs to be compared with the virtualized distributed system. Therefore, this paper presents the simulation and evaluation of the development of a distributed system using virtualization and dockerization. This simulation is based on Docker Swarm, VirtualBox, Ubuntu, Mac OS X, nginx and redis. To simulate and evaluate the distributed system in the same environment, all Swarm Nodes and Virtual Machines are created using VirtualBox on the same Mac OS X host. For making this evaluation rational, almost similar system resources are allocated to both at the beginning. Subsequently, similar servers nginx and redis are installed on the Swarm Node and Virtual Machine. Finally, based on the experimental simulation results, it evaluates their required resources and operational overheads; thus, their performance and effectiveness for designing distributed systems.