Exploring Layered Container Structure for Cost Efficient Microservice Deployment

Container, as a light-weight virtualization technology with the advantages of continuous integration and easy deployment, has been widely adopted to support diverse microservices. At runtime, non-local container images need to be frequently pulled from remote registries to local servers, resulting in large pulling traffic and hence long startup time. A distinctive feature in container-based microservice, which has not been exploited, is that container images are in layered structure and some common base layers can be shared between co-located microservices. In this paper, we propose a layer sharing microservice deployment and image pulling strategy which explores the advantage of layer sharing to speedup microservice startup and lower image storage consumption. The problem is formulated into an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) form. An Accelerated Distributed Augmented Lagrangian (ADAL) based distributed algorithm executed cooperatively by registries and servers is proposed. Through extensive trace driven experiments, we validate the high efficiency of our ADAL based algorithm as it accelerates the microservice startup by 2.30 times in average and reduces the storage consumption by 55.33%.