The Cost of Containerization for Your ScyllaDB

The article by Vladislav Zolotarov explores the performance implications of running ScyllaDB, a shard-per-core database architecture, within Docker containers, highlighting both the benefits and drawbacks of containerization. Docker's widespread adoption simplifies database management by standardizing deployment across platforms, but introduces a performance cost due to virtualization layers and relaxed resource isolation. Initial tests on AWS showed up to a 69% reduction in write throughput with default Docker settings, but performance improved significantly through optimizations like CPU pinning and network interrupt isolation, reducing the penalty to just 3%. While Docker's network virtualization remains a bottleneck, bypassing it with the --network host parameter further narrows the performance gap. The article concludes that while Docker offers ease of use, achieving close-to-native performance requires specific tuning, suggesting that users prioritize direct installation on latency-sensitive applications.