Commutativity-guaranteed Docker Image Reconstruction towards Effective Layer Sharing

Owing to the benefit of light weight, containers have become a promising enabler for cloud native computing. Container images composed of applications and dependencies support flexible service deployment and migration. Rapid adoption and integration of containers generate millions of images to be stored. Additionally, non-local images have to be frequently downloaded from the registry, resulting in huge amounts of traffic. Content Addressable Storage (CAS) has been adopted for saving storage and networking by enabling identical layers sharing across images. However, according to our measurements, the implication of CAS is significantly limited as layers are rarely fully identical in practice. In this paper, we propose to reconstruct the docker images to raise the number of identical layers and thereby reduce storage and network consumption. We explore the layered structure of images and define the commutativity of files to assure image validity. The image reconstruction is formulated as an integer nonlinear programming problem. Inspired by the observed similarity of layers, we design a similarity-aware online image reconstruction algorithm. Extensive evaluations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed approach.