An architecture proposal for checkpoint/restore on stateful containers
Rodrigo H. Müller, Cristina Meinhardt, Odorico Machado Mendizabal · Proceedings of the 37th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing · 2022
Containers have been widely adopted for the development of microservices and cloud-native applications. In parts, this popularization stems from the container orchestration platforms support, facilitating the development and continuously integrating large-scale applications. However, the established techniques offered by orchestration tools to replicate containers are insufficient to provide high availability and strong consistency for stateful containers. Thus, this paper proposes a Checkpoint/Restore (C/R) service to achieve fault-tolerance on stateful containers. Our service aims to eliminate the checkpoint management burden by adding a transparent C/R service into container orchestration platforms. The checkpointing service, implemented as an interceptor, is responsible for taking snapshots of application containers and coordinating the checkpoint execution with the delivery of requests. In case of faults, a new application container is automatically built from a recent snapshot, and the interceptor resumes the delivery of client requests since that checkpoint. A Proof of Concept using a Kubernetes cluster is implemented and corroborates for the feasibility of the C/R. Some challenges and future directions are discussed.