A Systematic Literature Review on Maintenance of Software Containers

Nowadays, cloud computing is gaining tremendous attention to deliver information via the internet. Virtualization plays a major role in cloud computing as it deploys multiple virtual machines on the same physical machine and thus results in improving resource utilization. Hypervisor-based virtualization and containerization are two commonly used approaches in operating system virtualization. In this article, we provide a systematic literature review on various phases in maintenance of containers including container image detection, container scheduling, container security measures, and performance evaluation of containers. We have selected 145 primary studies out of which 24% of studies are related to container performance evaluation, 42% of studies are related to container scheduling techniques, 22% of studies are related to container security measures, and 12% of studies are related to container image detection process. A few studies are related to container image detection process and evaluation of container security measures. Resource utilization is the most considered performance objective in almost all container scheduling techniques. We conclude that there is a need to introduce new tagging approaches, smell detection approaches, and also new approaches to detect and resolve threat issues in containers so that we can maintain the security of containers.