Docker CRIU Demo

tl;dr

An automated, annotated, interactive demo of live container migration using Virtualbox, Vagrant and ShutIt.

Currently co-authoring a book on Docker: Get 39% off with the code 39miell

CRIU?

CRIU is a technology designed to allow the checkpointing and restoration of programs in userspace in the Linux kernel.

Containerization is a natural fit for this, since in theory most of its dependencies are contained and thus easier to reason about.

Work is proceeding on this technology, and this demo gives a flavour of what’s possible. It’s based on a post Circle-CI recently published.

It shows:

A container being checkpointed and restarted

A container with state being checkpointed and restarted

A container with state being moved from one VM to another

You can see it in action here, and the code is here.

I think this technology is a giant leap forward for Docker. The applications for this for testing, delivery and operations are immense.

Another recent demo involving live Quake migration is here.

Refs:

http://criu.org/Docker

http://blog.kubernetes.io/2015/07/how-did-quake-demo-from-dockercon-work.html