Docker Container Deployment in Distributed Fog Infrastructures with Checkpoint/Restart

International audienceIn fog computing environments container deployment is a frequent operation which often lies in the critical path of services being delivered to an end user. Although creating a container can be very fast, the container's application needs to start before the container starts producing useful work. Depending on the application this startup process can be arbitrarily long. To speed up the application startup times we propose to snapshot the state of fully-deployed containers and restart future container instances from a pre-started application state. In our evaluations based on 14 real micro-service containers, this technique effectively reduces the startup phase with speedups between 1x (no speedup) and 60x