Containers emerged as cloud resource offerings. While the
advantages of containers, such as easing the application deployment,
orchestration and adaptation, work well for stateless applications, the
feasibility of containerization of stateful applications, such as database
management system (DBMS), still remains unclear due to potential performance
overhead. The myriad of container operation models and storage
backends even raises the complexity of operating a containerized
DBMS. Here, we present an extensible evaluation methodology to identify
performance overhead of a containerized DBMS by combining three
operational models and two storage backends. For each combination a
memory-bound and disk-bound workload is applied. The results show a
clear performance overhead for containerized DBMS on top of virtual
machines (VMs) compared to physical resources. Further, a containerized
DBMS on top of VMs with different storage backends results in a
tolerable performance overhead. Building upon these baseline results, we
derive a set of open evaluation challenges for containerized DBMSs
