This is a bachelor thesis regarding the performance differences for hosting a web-application in a virtualized environment. We compare virtual machines against containers and observe their resource usage in categories such as CPU, RAM and disk storage in idle state and perform a range of computation experiments in which response times are measured from a series of request intervals. Response times are measured with the help of a web-application created in Python. The experiments are performed under both normal and stressed conditions to give a better indication in to which virtualized environment outperform the other during different scenarios.

The results show that virtual machines and containers remained close to each other in response times during the first request interval, but the containers outperformed virtual machines in terms of resource usages while in idle state, they had less of a burden on the host computer. They were also significantly more rapid in terms of response times. This is also most noticeable during stressed conditions in which the virtual machine almost doubled its sluggishness.