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

Explore a conference talk from NSDI '22 that introduces Starlight, an innovative accelerator for container provisioning designed to address challenges in edge and mobile computing environments. Learn about the limitations of current container deployment methods over high-latency links and resource-constrained workers. Discover how Starlight rethinks the container deployment pipeline, decoupling provisioning from development through redesigned protocols, filesystems, and image storage formats. Examine the performance improvements achieved by Starlight, including 3.0x faster deployment and startup times for popular containers, with minimal storage overhead and full backwards compatibility. Gain insights into the Delta Bundle Protocol, Starlight's architecture, and its operation. Analyze evaluation results demonstrating Starlight's effectiveness across various network conditions and compare its performance to existing state-of-the-art implementations.

Intro
Starlight Contributions
What are Containers?
Deploying Containers on a Node
Fast Container Provisioning
Edge Challenges
Containers on the Edge
Why Slow?
Design of Delta Bundle Protocol
Delta Bundle Structure
Starlight Architecture
Starlight Operation
Evaluation
Effect of Round-trip Time
How Much Faster Are We?
Performance Overhead
Additional Experiments
Conclusion and Future Work