Evaluation of Impact of Security Measures on Container-based and VM-based Application Performance in Cloud

This paper explores the trade-off between security and performance of web applications hosted on Virtual Machine based environments and container-based environments. This paper also investigates the comparison between container and Virtual Machine performance on several aspects. With the increasing adoption of Virtual Machines and container technologies for web applications, understanding the significance of security measures becomes crucial. A series of tests were conducted on Virtual Machine based and container-based web applications, implementing encryption, and network isolation.This paper measures the key performance indicators, such as response time, CPU utilization, Memory utilization, and network utilization. The results indicate a 40% increase in the response time of a container than a Virtual Machine in the case where security measures have been applied to the environment. In the analysis of secured and unsecured VMs, all the metrics show a difference of less than 10%. However, in the case of containers, there is a significant difference in the performance ranging from 28–85% across the board.These findings highlight the need for optimized security strategies that mitigate performance degradation. Future works will focus on exploring more advanced cloud setups and additional security measures. This paper provides foundational analysis to balance security and performance in the design and deployment of modern web applications.