What is it about?

Application containers have become integral to modern cloud computing environments due to their flexibility and efficiency. Migrating containers across hosts facilitates cost-effective cloud management by improving server consolidation, load balancing, and fault tolerance. However, during migration, the services or applications running within the container experience downtime, rendering them temporarily unresponsive. This paper addresses the challenge of minimizing this service downtime to enhance reliability and user experience.

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Why is it important?

One of the primary objectives of container migration is to reduce the service downtime of applications hosted in containers. The service downtime depends on performing the migration activities efficiently, specifically from the time the container is stopped on the source host till it is restored and fully functional at the destination host. In this paper, we present a solution, PCLive, on top CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace) which reduces this service downtime using a pipelined technique. With PCLive, we achieve up to ∼2.7x reduction in service downtime for migration of an application container hosting the Redis key-value store over an one Gbps network. We have added flexibility in PCLive to address resource (CPU and Memory) overheads.

Perspectives

The iterative pre-copy approach for container migration, which utilizes incremental checkpoint and restore techniques, offers flexibility and broad applicability. However, it is less effective at minimizing service downtime due to inherent design limitations in the restoration process. To the best of our knowledge, no existing work has specifically addressed downtime reduction in iterative pre-copy live migration of containers in inter-host scenarios. In this paper, we introduce PCLive, on top of CRIU which overcomes these design limitations by employing a pipelined restoration mechanism. This approach brings container migration closer to virtual machine (VM) migration in terms of downtime efficiency.

Shiv Bhushan Tripathi
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

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This page is a summary of: PCLive: Pipelined Restoration of Application Containers for Reduced Service Downtime, November 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3698038.3698545.
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