Docker Container Deployment in Fog Computing Infrastructures

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 optimizations which, once combined, reduce container deployment times by a factor up to 4. These optimizations also speed up deployment time by about 30% in datacenter-grade servers.