Enabling container failover by extending current container migration techniques

Historically virtual machines have been the backbone of the cloud-industry, allowing cloud-providers to offer virtualized multi-tenant solutions. A key aspect of the cloud is its flexibility and abstraction of the underlying hardware. Virtual machines can enhance this aspect by enabling support for live migration and failover. Live migration is the process of moving a running virtual machine from one host to another and failover ensures that a failed virtual machine will automatically be restarted (possibly on another host). Today, as containers continue to increase in popularity and make up a larger portion of the cloud, often replacing virtual machines, it becomes increasingly important for these processes to be available to containers as well. However, little support for container live migration and failover exists and remains largely experimental. Furthermore, no solution seems to exists that offers both live migration and failover for containers in a unified solution. The thesis presents a proof-of-concept implementation and description of a system that enables support for both live migration and failover for containers by extending current container migration techniques. It is able to offer this to any OCI-compliant container, and could therefore potentially be integrated into current container and container orchestration frameworks. In addition, measurements for the proof-of-concept implementation are provided and used to compare the proof-of-concept implementation to a current container migration technique. Furthermore, the thesis presents an overview of the history and implementation of containers, current migration techniques, and metrics that can be used for measuring different migration techniques are introduced. The paper concludes that current container migration techniques can be extended in order to support both live migration and failover, and that in doing so one might expect to achieve a downtime equal to, and total migration time lower than that of pre-copy migration. Supporting both live migration and failover, however, comes at a cost of an increased amount of data needed to be transferred between the hosts