Virtual machines vs. containers in cloud gaming systems

In cloud gaming the game is rendered on a distant cloud server and the resulting video stream is sent back to the user who controls the game via a thin client. The high resource usage of cloud gaming servers is a challenge. Expensive hardware including GPUs have to be efficiently shared among multiple simultaneous users. The cloud servers use virtualization techniques to isolate users and share resources among dedicated servers. The traditional virtualization techniques can however inflict notable performance overhead limiting the user count for a single server. Operating-system-level virtualization instances known as containers are an emerging trend in cloud computing. Containers don´t need to virtualize the entire operating system still providing most of the benefits of virtualization. In this paper, we evaluate the container-based alternative to traditional virtualization in cloud gaming systems through extensive experiments. We also discuss the differences needed in system implementation using the container approach and identify the existing limitations.