Container-based Service State Management in Cloud Computing

In a cloud data center, the client requests are catered by placing the services in its servers. Such services are deployed through a sandboxing platform to ensure proper isolation among services from different users. Due to the lightweight nature, containers have become increasingly popular to support such sandboxing. However, for supporting effective and efficient data center resource usage with minimum resource footprints, improving the containers' consolidation ratio is significant for the cloud service providers. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose an exciting direction to significantly boost up the consolidation ratio of a data-center environment by effectively managing the containers' states. We observe that many cloud-based application services are event-triggered, so they remain inactive unless some external service request comes. We exploit the fact that the containers remain in an idle state when the underlying service is not active, and thus such idle containers can be checkpointed unless an external service request comes. However, the challenge here is to design an efficient mechanism such that an idle container can be resumed quickly to prevent the loss of the application's quality of service (QoS). We have implemented the system, and the evaluation is performed in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm can manage the containers' states, ensuring the increase of consolidation ratio.