Exploring the Dependency Network of Docker Containers: Structure, Diversity, and Relationship

Container technologies are being widely used in large scale production cloud environments, of which Docker has become the de-facto industry standard. As a key step, containers need to define their dependent base image, which makes complex dependencies exist in a large number of containers. Prior studies have shown that references between software packages could form technical dependencies, thus forming a dependency network. However, little is known about the details of docker container dependency networks. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the dependency network of docker containers from more than 120,000 dockerfiles. We construct the container dependency network and analyze its network structure. Further, we focus on the Top-100 dominant containers and investigate their subnetworks, including diversity and relationships. Our findings help to characterize and understand the container dependencies in the docker community and motivate the need for developing container dependency management tools.