A Performance Comparison of Virtualization Techniques to Deploy a 5G Monitoring Platform

The constant search for solutions to improve performance and resource efficiency in Cloud platforms has led to the introduction of new virtualization technologies and deployment paradigms. From container-based virtualization to micro virtual machines, new virtualization solutions claim to offer a performance close to bare-metal, with quick deployment and startup times. Furthermore, serverless computing has recently emerged as an alternative deployment model for Cloud workloads, providing scalability and cost reduction without requiring any additional configuration overhead from developers. In this work, we present a performance comparison of well-known virtualization technologies, e.g., virtual machines or containers, together with new, serverless-oriented virtualization solutions, all of them applied to deploy a real monitoring architecture for multi-site 5G platforms. The analysis shows that serverless technologies do not achieve the same performance than well-known virtualization technologies, evaluating as a result the suitability of these new virtualization technologies for production environments, extracting useful conclusions to lay the ground for future work related to this novel paradigm.