MicroVM on Edge: Is It Ready for Prime Time?

Container virtualization is recognized as indispensable for realizing the vision of edge computing due to its advantages. However, OS-level virtualization suffers from a relatively low degree of security. Recently, microVM technology has emerged in response to this deficiency to provide stronger isolation and security while delivering performance comparable to the containers. In this work, we aim to gain a better understanding of microVM's suitability for edge computing in comparison with containers. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse workloads to test how microVMs compare against containers in several aspects. Through rigorous measurements and analysis, we extract several important findings. Despite having a more complex architecture than containers, microVMs perform comparably to the containers in terms of I/o performance. MicroVMs can even outperform containers in certain I/O workload types by 69%. Network I/O performance of microVMs can be 3x better than containers. We provide our findings and insights on the performance characteristics of microVMs on edge.