Title: Docker-pi: Docker container deployment in fog computing infrastructures

Authors: Arif Ahmed; Guillaume Pierre

Addresses: Inria, CNRS, IRISA, University of Rennes 1, F-35000 Rennes, France ' Inria, CNRS, IRISA, University of Rennes 1, F-35000 Rennes, France

Abstract: The transition from virtual machine-based infrastructures to container-based ones brings the promise of swift and efficient software deployment in large-scale computing infrastructures. However, in fog computing environments which are often made of very small computers such as Raspberry Pis, deploying even a very simple Docker container may take multiple minutes. We demonstrate that Docker makes inefficient usage of the available hardware resources, essentially using different hardware subsystems (network bandwidth, CPU, disk I/O) sequentially rather than simultaneously. We therefore propose three optimisations which, once combined, reduce container deployment times by a factor up to 4. These optimisations also speed up deployment time by about 30% in datacentre-grade servers.

Keywords: Docker; container; fog computing; deployment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2020.105885

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2020 Vol.9 No.1, pp.6 - 27

Received: 23 Jan 2019
Accepted: 26 Aug 2019
Published online: 16 Mar 2020 *

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