research-article

Extending storage support for unikernel containers

Authors:

Orestis Lagkas Nikolos,

Konstantinos Papazafeiropoulos,

Stratos Psomadakis,

Anastassios Nanos,

Nectarios KozirisAuthors Info & Claims

WOSC '19: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Serverless Computing

Pages 31 - 36

https://doi.org/10.1145/3366623.3368138

Published: 09 December 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid adoption of the serverless computing paradigm has led to the proliferation of Function-as-a-Service computing frameworks. The majority of these frameworks utilize containers, a lightweight operating system virtualization technique, to ensure isolated function execution. Unikernels, which package applications within a single-address space library operating system, have been proposed as an alternative function isolation mechanism, which offers stronger isolation guarantees without suffering the performance penalties of full hardware virtualization. However, due to different storage semantics between containers and unikernels, the state-of-the-art approaches for using unikernels in place of containers result in decreased performance, inefficient resource utilization and limited functionality.

In this paper we bridge the storage gap between containers and unikernels in the context of serverless computing. First, we examine and categorize the storage requirements for building and running functions based on unikernels. Based on these requirements, we design and prototype a framework, which extends the Docker storage layer to support unikernel images. Our framework enables the sharing of common read-only unikernel image layers between functions and moves the unikernel image building overhead away from the critical path of function execution. We show that our framework improves function instantiation times while reducing storage space overhead.

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Cited By

Tzenetopoulos AApostolakis ETzomaka APapakostopoulos CStavrakakis KKatsaragakis MOroutzoglou IMasouros DXydis SSoudris D(2021)FaaS and Curious: Performance Implications of Serverless Functions on Edge Computing PlatformsHigh Performance Computing10.1007/978-3-030-90539-2_29(428-438)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90539-2_29
Aggarwal VThangaraju B(2020)Performance Analysis of Virtualisation Technologies in NFV and Edge Deployments2020 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (CONECCT)10.1109/CONECCT50063.2020.9198367(1-5)Online publication date: Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/CONECCT50063.2020.9198367

Index Terms

Extending storage support for unikernel containers
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
      1. Cloud computing
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems

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cover image ACM Conferences

WOSC '19: Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Serverless Computing

December 2019

59 pages

ISBN:9781450370387

DOI:10.1145/3366623

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 December 2019

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Middleware '19: 20th International Middleware Conference

December 9 - 13, 2019

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Cited By

Tzenetopoulos AApostolakis ETzomaka APapakostopoulos CStavrakakis KKatsaragakis MOroutzoglou IMasouros DXydis SSoudris D(2021)FaaS and Curious: Performance Implications of Serverless Functions on Edge Computing PlatformsHigh Performance Computing10.1007/978-3-030-90539-2_29(428-438)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90539-2_29
Aggarwal VThangaraju B(2020)Performance Analysis of Virtualisation Technologies in NFV and Edge Deployments2020 IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (CONECCT)10.1109/CONECCT50063.2020.9198367(1-5)Online publication date: Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/CONECCT50063.2020.9198367

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