Xen Developer Summit 2015

The container technologies, including Docker containers are being widely adopted for packaging and deploying applications. Limitations with today’s bare-metal containers are security and performance isolation as containers share the same host operating system.
We propose “Xen containers” to run Docker container applications sandboxed in a small VM as an alternative to bare-metal containers. Xen containers in PVH, for example, provide tighter security and resource isolation. By using minimalist VMs that spin up in sub-seconds and consume couple of tens of MBs of memory, the advantages of the Xen containers outweigh (negligible) overhead of virtualization. We compare the bare-metal containers and Xen containers in various aspects in the presentation.