Xen is having a tough time keeping up with qemu/KVM which can take advantage of all the development time Intel spends on the kernel and the scheduler.
Obviously Xen will have a long life due to AWS, but I am failing to see anything that machined and kvm don't offer here on the performance oriented side.
There is probably be some use case but the xen time slice model doesn't seem to know enough about frequency binning or the impacts of high energy/heat instructions on them to be very competitive in the applications I can think of.
Dockers main problem is an increasing number of use cases, and their engineering decisions not meeting everyone's needs. To be honest if it wasn't for faux container support needs on windows/osx I am betting that systemd-nspawn would take over that market due to this.
For the most part docker performance is mostly limited by concurrency and amdahl's law (including fs perf). I don't see Xen solving these issues, but there are very real security benefits.
One very real use case I can think of is that any person or process that can launch a container on Docker is effectively given password-less sudo access, particularly because you can't disable the privileged flag. The attack surface on Xen would be much lower in that case but once the exploits start arriving docker could change that choice and reduce their attack surface quite a bit.
Obviously Xen will have a long life due to AWS, but I am failing to see anything that machined and kvm don't offer here on the performance oriented side.
There is probably be some use case but the xen time slice model doesn't seem to know enough about frequency binning or the impacts of high energy/heat instructions on them to be very competitive in the applications I can think of.
Dockers main problem is an increasing number of use cases, and their engineering decisions not meeting everyone's needs. To be honest if it wasn't for faux container support needs on windows/osx I am betting that systemd-nspawn would take over that market due to this.
For the most part docker performance is mostly limited by concurrency and amdahl's law (including fs perf). I don't see Xen solving these issues, but there are very real security benefits.
One very real use case I can think of is that any person or process that can launch a container on Docker is effectively given password-less sudo access, particularly because you can't disable the privileged flag. The attack surface on Xen would be much lower in that case but once the exploits start arriving docker could change that choice and reduce their attack surface quite a bit.