For many of the companies that provide the container-based apps that have become a ubiquitous part of daily life—from productivity and lifestyle tools to e-commerce to streaming media—Kubernetes offers the scalability and configuration options they need to balance loads and ensure high availability. Two major strategies for Kubernetes installation, virtualized and bare metal, can vary significantly in the ways they affect manageability and performance. A virtualized approach can provide resource isolation, simplified management, and shared infrastructure across various workloads. A bare metal approach can reduce layers of abstraction and allow direct, overhead-free access to hardware resources. Understanding how each Kubernetes approach may impact performance with workloads like streaming data or classic online transaction processing (OLTP) can help businesses select a Kubernetes platform that will best suit their specific performance and operational needs.
We used two popular Kubernetes platforms to compare the performance of virtualized and bare metal deployments. To represent a virtualized approach, we used VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) with VMware Cloud Foundation. For the bare metal approach, we used Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) installed directly on the hardware. To evaluate the performance of each environment in both modern and traditional containerized workloads, we used a Kafka streaming workload and a HammerDB TPROC-C OLTP workload with PostgreSQL.
In both workloads, the VKS solution provided significantly better performance than the Red Hat OCP bare metal solution. VKS sustained higher throughput for Kafka producer workloads, including up to 73 percent more throughput and up to 78 percent lower latency. VKS also supported more data channels before exceeding the 50ms latency threshold that can cause problems in certain real-time applications. In our database OLTP testing with PostgreSQL, VKS delivered 80 percent more new orders per minute than the OCP bare metal environment.
Our findings suggest that virtualization with VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service presents a compelling Kubernetes installation option for businesses seeking to support faster modern application response times, better real-time data processing, and more efficient infrastructure use.
To learn more about our Kubernetes installation performance comparison tests, check out the report below.
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