Ray Lucchesi of RayOnStorage Blog comments:
Just got back from EMCWorld2016 this week but on the way there and back I was perusing the FAST’167 papers. One of the papers I read (see Slacker: Fast Distribution with Lazy Docker Containers, p. 181) discussed performance problems with initializing Docker container micro-services and how they could be solved using persistent, intelligent NFS storage.
It appears that Docker container initialization spends a lot of time provisioning and initializing a local file system for each container. Docker containers typically make use of an AUFS (Another Union File System) storage driver which makes use of another file system (like ext4) as its underlying storage which has beneath it either DAS or external storage.
Docker instantiation is already very fast. Making it faster could be a boon for applications that need to spin up tens of thousands of instances very very quickly.
Read more at: Faster Docker initialization through Slacker snapshots & NFS storage
