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Towards a Scalable Docker Registry

Containers are an alternative to virtual machines rapidly increasing in popularity due to their minimal overhead. To help facilitate their adoption, containers use management systems with central registries to store and distribute container images. However, these registries rely on other, preexisting services to provide load balancing and storage, which limits their scalability. This thesis introduces a new registry design for Docker, the most prevalent container management system. The new design coalesces all the services into a single, highly scalable, registry. By increasing the scalability of the registry, the new design greatly decreases the distribution time for container images. This work also describes a new Docker registry benchmarking tool, the trace player, that uses real Docker registry workload traces to test the performance of new registry designs and setups. / Master of Science / Cloud services allow many different web applications to run on shared machines. The applications can be owned by a variety of customers to provide many different types of services. Because these applications are owned by different customers, they need to be isolated to ensure the users’ privacy and security. Containers are one technology that can provide isolation to the applications on a single machine, and they are rapidly gaining popularity as they incur less overhead on the applications that use them. This means the applications will run faster with the same isolation guarantees as other isolation technologies. Containers also allow the cloud provider to run more applications on a single machine, letting them serve more customers. Docker is by far the most popular container management system on the market. It provides a registry service for containerized application storage and distribution. Users can store snapshots of their applications on the registry, and then use the snapshots to run multiple copies of the application on different machines. As more and more users use the registry service, the registry becomes slower, making it take longer for users to pull their applications from the registry. This will increase the start time of their application, making them harder to scale out their application to more machines to accommodate more customers of their services. This work creates a new registry design that will allow the registry to handle more users, and allow them to retrieve their applications even faster than what’s currently possible. This will allow them to more rapidly scale their applications out to more machines to handle more customers. The customers, in turn, will have a better experience.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/83814
Date29 June 2018
CreatorsLittley, Michael Brian
ContributorsElectrical and Computer Engineering, Butt, Ali R., Yang, Yaling, Tront, Joseph G.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
FormatETD, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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