Just got back from EMCWorld2016 this week but on the way there and back I was perusing the FAST’16 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.
When using persistent and intelligent NFS storage, Docker can take advantage of storage system snapshots and cloning to improve container initialization significantly. In the paper, the researchers used Tintri as the underlying persistent, enterprise class NFS storage but I believe the functionality that’s taken advantage of is available with most enterprise class NAS systems and as such, is readily available with other storage subsystems.
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