  The automotive industry is transitioning from traditional ECU-based systems
to software-defined vehicles. A central role of this revolution is played by
containers, lightweight virtualization technologies that enable the flexible
consolidation of complex software applications on a common hardware platform.
Despite their widespread adoption, the impact of containerization on
fundamental real-time metrics such as end-to-end latency, communication jitter,
as well as memory and CPU utilization has remained virtually unexplored. This
paper presents a microservice architecture for a real-world autonomous driving
application where containers isolate each service. Our comprehensive evaluation
shows the benefits in terms of end-to-end latency of such a solution even over
standard bare-Linux deployments. Specifically, in the case of the presented
microservice architecture, the mean end-to-end latency can be improved by 5-8
%. Also, the maximum latencies were significantly reduced using container
deployment.
