25 posts tagged with "dragonfly"

The Evolution of the Nydus Image Acceleration​

Optimized container images together with technologies such as P2P networks can effectively speed up the process of container deployment and startup. In order to achieve this, we developed the Nydus image acceleration service (also a sub-project of CNCF Dragonfly).

In addition to startup speed, core features such as image layering, lazy pulling etc. are also particularly important in the field of container images. But since there is no native filesystem supporting that, most opt for the userspace solution, and Nydus initially did the same. However user-mode solutions are encountering more and more challenges nowadays, such as a huge gap in performance compared with native filesystems, and noticable resource overhead in high-density employed scenarios.

Therefore, we designed and implemented the RAFS v6 format which is compatible with the in-kernel EROFS filesystem, hoping to form a content-addressable in-kernel filesystem for container images. After the lazy-pulling technology of "EROFS over Fscache" was merged into 5.19 kernel, the next-generation architecture of Nydus is gradually becoming clear. This is the first native in-kernel solution for container images, promoting a high-density, high-performance and high-availability solution for container images.

This article will introduce the evolution of Nydus from three perspectives: Nydus architecture outline, RAFS v6 image format and "EROFS over Fscache" on-demand loading technology.

Please refer to Nydus for more details of this project. Now you can experience all these new features with this user guide.

Containerd Accepted Nydus-snapshotter​

Early January, Containerd community has taken in nydus-snapshotter as a sub-project. Check out the code, particular introductions and tutorial from its new repository. We believe that the donation to containerd will attract more users and developers for nydus itself and bring much value to the community users.

Introducing Dragonfly Container Image Service​

Small is Fast, Large is Slow​

With containers, it is relatively fast to deploy web apps, mobile backends, and API services right out of the box. Why? Because the container images they use are generally small (hundreds of MBs).

A larger challenge is deploying applications with a huge container image (several GBs). It takes a good amount of time to have these images ready to use. We want the time spent shortened to a certain extent to leverage the powerful container abstractions to run and scale the applications fast.

Dragonfly has been doing well at distributing container images. However, users still have to download an entire container image before creating a new container. Another big challenge is arising security concerns about container image.

Conceptually, we pack application's environment into a single image that is more easily shared with consumers. Image is then put into a filesystem locally on top of which an application can run. The pieces that are now being launched as nydus are the culmination of the years of work and experience of our team in building filesystems. Here we introduce the dragonfly image service (codename nydus) as an extension to the Dragonfly project. It's software that minimizes download time and provides image integrity check across the whole lifetime of a container, enabling users to manage applications fast and safely.

nydus is co-developed by engineers from Alibaba Cloud and Ant Group. It is widely used in the internal production deployments. From our experience, we value its container creation speedup and image isolation enhancement the most. And we are seeing interesting use cases of it from time to time.

Guest post by Pengtao and Liubo, Software Engineers at Ant Group

Tao is a software engineer at Ant Group. He has been working on Linux file system development for more than 10 years. He is also a core maintainer of Kata Containers project. In recent years, Tao mainly works on container runtime and services. He is a strong believer and advocator for open source and cloud native technology_

Bo Liu, he has been an active contributor of Linux kernel since 2009, mostly working on the Btrfs Filesystem, and now he is working at Alibaba Group, his main interest is linux filesystems and container technologies.

Small is Fast, Large is Slow​

With containers, it is relatively fast to deploy web apps, mobile backends, and API services right out of the box. Why? Because the container images they use are generally small (hundreds of MB).

A larger challenge is deploying applications with a huge container image (several GB). It takes a good amount of time to have these images ready to use. We want the time spent shortened to a certain extent to leverage the powerful container abstractions to run and scale the applications fast.

Dragonfly has been doing well at distributing container images. However, users still have to download an entire container image before creating a new container.

Another big challenge is arising security concerns about container image.

Conceptually, we pack application’s environment into a single image that is more easily shared with consumers. Image is then put into a filesystem locally on top of which an application can run. The pieces that are now being launched as nydus are the culmination of the years of work and experience of our team in building filesystems.

Here we introduce the dragonfly image service called nydus as an extension to the Dragonfly project.  It’s software that minimizes download time and provides image integrity check across the whole lifetime of a container, enabling users to manage applications fast and safely.

nydus is co-developed by engineers from Alibaba Cloud and Ant Group. It is widely used in the internal production deployments. From our experience, we value its container creation speedup and image isolation enhancement the most. And we are seeing interesting use cases of it from time to time.

This post was migrated by mingcheng from a CNCF Blog post.

Today, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Dragonfly as an incubation-level hosted project.

Dragonfly, which was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in October 2018, is an open source, cloud native image and file distribution system. Dragonfly was created in June 2015 by Alibaba Cloud to improve the user experience of image and file distribution in Kubernetes. This allows engineers in enterprises to focus on the application itself rather than infrastructure management.

“Dragonfly is one of the backbone technologies for container platforms within Alibaba’s ecosystem, supporting billions of application deliveries each year, and in use by many enterprise customers around the world,” said, Li Yi, senior staff engineer, Alibaba. “Alibaba looks forward to continually improving Dragonfly, making it more efficient and easier to use.”

The goal of Dragonfly is to tackle distribution problems in cloud native scenarios. The project is comprised of three main components: supernode plays the role of central scheduler and controls all distribution procedure among the peer network; dfget resides on each peer as an agent to download file pieces; and “dfdaemon” plays the role of proxy which intercepts image downloading requests from container engine to dfget.

“Dragonfly improves the user experience by taking advantage of a P2P image and file distribution protocol and easing the network load of the image registry,” said Sheng Liang, TOC member and project sponsor. “As organizations across the world migrate their workloads onto container stacks, we expect the adoption of Dragonfly to continue to increase significantly.”

Dragonfly integrates with other CNCF projects, including Prometheus, containerd, Harbor, Kubernetes, and Helm. Project maintainers come from Alibaba, ByteDance, eBay, and Meitu, and there are more than 20 contributing companies, including NetEase, JD.com, Walmart, VMware, Shopee, ChinaMobile, Qunar, ZTE, Qiniu, NVIDIA, and others.

Main Dragonfly Features:

• P2P based file distribution: Using P2P technology for file transmission, which can make full use of the bandwidth resources of each peer to improve download efficiency, saves a lot of cross-IDC bandwidth, especially costly cross-board bandwidth.
• Non-invasive support for all kinds of container technologies: Dragonfly can seamlessly support various containers for distributing images.
• Host level speed limit: Many downloading tools (wget/curl) only have rate limit for the current download task, but dragonfly also provides a rate limit for the entire host.
• Passive CDN: The CDN mechanism can avoid repetitive remote downloads.

Notable Milestones:

• 7 project maintainers from 4 organizations