Starlight: Fast Container Provisioning on the Edge and over the WAN

Containers, originally designed for cloud environments, are increasingly popular for provisioning workers outside the cloud, for example in mobile and edge computing. These settings, however, bring new challenges: high latency links, limited bandwidth, and resource-constrained workers. The result is longer provisioning times when deploying new workers or updating existing ones, much of it due to network traffic.

Our analysis shows that current piecemeal approaches to reducing provisioning time are not always sufficient, and can even make things worse as round-trip times grow. Rather, we find that the very same layer-based structure that makes containers easy to develop and use also makes it more difficult to optimize deployment. Addressing this issue thus requires rethinking the container deployment pipeline as a whole.

Based on our findings, we present Starlight: an accelerator for container provisioning. Starlight decouples provisioning from development by redesigning the container deployment protocol, filesystem, and image storage format. Our evaluation using 21 popular containers shows that, on average, Starlight deploys and starts containers 3.0× faster than the current state-of-the-art implementation while incurring no runtime overhead and little (5%) storage overhead. Finally, it is backwards compatible with existing workers and uses standard container registries.