Multi-Staged Extensible I/O Scheme for Storage Reliability and Stability on Docker Container Platforms

Abstract

The docker container-based virtualization is becoming mainstream in cloud computing due to its potential benefits, such as a lightweight resource footprint and quick deployment. However, docker containers can suffer from a lack of stability in provisioning per-container storage space, which can lead to undesirable consequences, such as abrupt application termination requiring execution restart or substantial data loss. In this paper, we propose an I/O storage scheme (mSEM) to enhance the storage reliability and stability of docker containers by dynamically enlarging the data reservoir for each container through the effective data path redirection to our extensible storage space. We measure the performance of our method, while comparing its performance to the baseline docker and kubernetes using three benchmarks: filebench, postmark and vdbench. The results show that our method produces three times higher I/O bandwidth than both baselines under storage shortage conditions. More importantly, even when there is no available storage space left and the baseline stops execution, our method can continue application execution with no severe performance degradation.