Unanswered research questions in container technologies for cloud computing
Establish containerization approaches that (i) provide security isolation comparable to virtual machines despite shared kernels, (ii) optimize container performance, and (iii) mitigate unpredictable co‑tenant interference and side‑channel leakage in multi‑tenant environments such as Kubernetes and Docker-based clouds.
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Recent investigations into container technology reveal unanswered research questions. Firstly, containers are less secure than VMs since they share the kernel, but this is something that may be fixed in future versions with the help of Unikernel. Secondly, optimizing container performance is a time-consuming endeavor that requires buffer space. Thirdly, because containers share the same computing/hardware resources, co-located tenants can suffer from unpredictable performance interference when the CPU Shares algorithm is used, and even worse, they can leak information enabling side-channel attacks to be performed by a malicious tenant.