LXCloud-CR: Towards LinuX Containers Distributed Hash Table based Checkpoint-Restart

- We propose LXCloud-CR, our decentralized C/R model which takes snapshots of LXC instances.
- We present an up-to-date comparison of containers and virtual machines environments.
- We present our hypothesis of work on the Checkpoint-Restart on IaaS based containers.
- We present our model LXCloud-CR and introduce an algorithmic description.
- We demonstrate the benefits of LXCloud-CR with experiments using 150 containers on Grid'5000.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) container-based virtualization technology is gaining, over these years, significant interest in industry as an alternative platform for running distributed applications. They present an interesting alternative to virtual machines in the Cloud due to newer advances in container-based virtualization as a new technology that simplify the deployment of applications. As the cloud architectures continue to grow in scale and complexity, faults become very recurrent which make reliability a true challenge. Given the dynamic nature of IaaS clouds and the pay-as-you-go cloud model where the costs are directly proportional to the resource usage, a Checkpoint Restart mechanism is essential in this context. We propose LXCloud-CR our new decentralized Checkpoint-Restart model based on a distributed checkpoints repository using key-value store on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). It is able to take snapshots of the whole Linux Container (LXC) instances. LXCloud-CR aims to reduce the runtime and storage overheads of checkpointing. Large scale experiments on the Grid'5000 testbed demonstrate the benefits of our proposal. Obtained results validate our model and improve the performance of applications.