Given a Docker image you can spin up a container in lots of places.  For example on my Mac under Boot2Docker, at Orchard, or on Digital Ocean.   I don’t have any bare metal at hand, so these all involve the slight tax of virtual machine.

I ran the same experiment on these three.  The experiment launches 18 containers, serially.  The jobs they varied; but they are not very large.

180 seconds Boot2Docker
189 seconds Orchard
149 seconds Digital Ocean

These numbers are almost certainly meaningless!  I don’t even know what might be slowing things down: CPU, I/O, Swap, etc.

Interestingly if I launch all 18 containers in parallel I get similar results +/-10%.  The numbers vary only a few percent if I run these experiments repeatedly.  I warmed up the machines a bit by running a few jobs first.

Yeah.  Adding Google App Engine and EC2 would be interesting.

While Orchard charges $10/month v.s. Digital Ocean’s $5 their billing granularity is better.  You purchase 10 minutes, and then a minute at a time, v.s. Digital Ocean which bills an hour at a time.  Orchard is a little more convenient to use v.s. Digital Ocean.  A bit-o-scripting could fix that.

I’m using this for batch jobs.  Hence I have an itch: a batch Q manager for container runs.  That would, presumably assure that machines are spun up and down to balance cost and throughput.

Queue of Containers