Container Technologies for ARM Architecture: A Comprehensive Survey of the State-of-the-Art

Container technology is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative to traditional virtual machines because it provides a faster, lighter, and more portable runtime environment for the applications. A container bundles the application and its binary code, libraries, and configuration files together while sharing the host operating system image. Accordingly, containers efficiently share resources and operate small micro-services, software programs, and even more extensive applications with less overhead than virtual machines. There are many container technologies available with Docker being the most popular and many technologies support multiple architectures, including the ARM architecture. Due to its energy efficiency and high-performance, which are crucial parameters in containerization, ARM architecture is becoming prevalent in container technologies. In this paper, we explore various container technologies that support ARM architecture and investigate the pros and cons of each technology. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis of both container orchestrators and container runtimes that are most prominent competitors of Docker. We also consider security of container technologies with particular focus on the image scanning tools that supports ARM architecture. Our survey reveals that ARM technology is gaining popularity in containerization and almost all recent technologies support ARM architecture.