In this paper, we analyze the performance of MicroVM when running AI applications on an edge computing environment and whether it can replace current container technology and traditional virtual machines. To achieve this, we set up Docker container, F...
In this paper, we analyze the performance of MicroVM when running AI applications on an edge computing environment and whether it can replace current container technology and traditional virtual machines. To achieve this, we set up Docker container, Firecracker MicroVM and KVM virtual machine environments on a Raspberry Pi 4 and executed representative AI applications in each environment. We analyze the inference time, total CPU usage and trends over time and file I/O performance on each environment. The results show that there is no significant performance difference between MicroVM and container when running AI applications. Moreover, on average, a stable inference time over multiple trials was observed on MicroVM. Therefore, we can confirm that executing AI applications using MicroVM instead of container or heavy-weight virtual machine is suitable for an edge computing.