Performance Analysis of Lightweight Container Orchestration Platforms for Edge-Based IoT Applications

The rise of Microservices architectures has introduced a surge in the demand for containerized software provisioning and orchestration. Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration platform widely adopted for its efficient management of containerized applications within cloud datacenters. However, the proliferation of containerized applications, particularly in resource-constrained environments like Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, has prompted numerous software vendors to release lightweight Kubernetes-derived platforms, tailored for streamlined deployment in such infrastructures. Despite this, selecting the most suitable distribution for edge-based IoT applications remains a challenge due to a lack of comprehensive studies in this domain. This paper presents a comprehensive model for evaluating the performance of lightweight Container Orchestration Distributions (CODs), incorporating resource usage, control-plane performance, and data-plane performance metrics. Also, we conduct a comparative empirical analysis of four prominent CODs (i.e., k0s, k3s, Microk8s, and Microshift) by focusing on their suitability for edge environments. Our findings reveal that k3s is the overall best-performant COD.