2024-09-28 –, AI/SRE
We are currently in a stage where containers are deployed everywhere from applications in cluster orchestrators to development environments and build systems. As we move towards such a huge scale, the time to start a new container becomes a bottleneck in all our workflows.
The time to pull images from the registry is a significant contributor to this startup time. Lazy loading of images is one method in which the startup time can be improved and in this talk we will dive into stargz snapshotter and estargz image format which achieves the same in docker, containerd and kubernetes environments.
estargz is a lazily pullable image format that is compliant with the OCI image spec based on the container registry filesystem from google. This talk will dive in detail into the concept of snapshotters in containerd and a brief overview of different types of snapshotters. An intro to OCI images also will be provided so that a basic understanding of how images are stored and transferred over the network and used while running containers is formed. We will dig deeper into estargz image format and the working of stargz snapshotter. Performance metrics will be given on startup time, and time to run the containers in various cases. After the talk attendees will have an understanding of
- OCI images
- Concept of snapshots
- stargz snapshotter
- Viability of using stargz in their environments.
Akhil works as a Software Engineer at VMware by Broadcom. An active contributor to projects in cloud native and container ecosystem. Akhil is a maintainer for containerd and kubernetes publishing-bot. He works mostly on container runtimes and kubernetes sig-node areas.