Stateful Container Migration in Geo-Distributed Environments

Abstract

Container migration is an essential functionality in large-scale geo-distributed platforms such as fog computing infrastructures. Contrary to migration within a single data center, long-distance migration requires that the container's disk state should be migrated together with the container itself. However, this state may be arbitrarily large, so its transfer may create long periods of unavailability for the container. We propose to exploit the layered structure provided by the OverlayFS file system to transparently snapshot the volumes' contents and transfer them prior to the actual container migration. We implemented this mechanism within Kubernetes. Our evaluations based on a real fog computing test-bed show that our techniques reduce the container's downtime during migration by a factor 4 compared to a baseline with no volume checkpoint.