Enhancing the Availability of Docker Swarm Using Checkpoint-and-Restore

More and more software developers and information-technology professionals embrace the container technology, because it packs the required libraries and settings of software into a single image so that the deployment can be easily done anywhere without the issues of compatibility. On top of single containers, orchestration tools are essential to automate the deployment and operation of complex systems that involve multiple containers on a cluster of machines. In this paper, we present the idea of using checkpoint-and-restore technique to enhance the availability of Docker Swarm, a state-of-art orchestration tool for Docker containers. We used multi-version checkpoints to strengthen the availability of containers and investigated the optimal storage and performance for checkpoint-and-restore. Experiments show that the proposed method can save about 50% of storage space with few overhead on the original process.