Modern web developers can push to staging or production multiple times a day. Each time this happens, there is a delay while images are distributed to the nodes, especially if the images need to be pulled from a remote registry. This can be a significant issue, forcing developers and ops to wait much longer than necessary while a deployment rolls out.
Container Solutions have recently been looking at one way to alleviate this problem, by using bittorrent to rapidly distribute images across the cluster. This work resulted in a proof of concept, known as ImageWolf.
ImageWolf is deployed to a cluster and will listen for pushes to a registry. When an image is pushed, it will pull the image and distribute to all other nodes in the cluster. When the image is subsequently run on the cluster, it should start almost instantaneously regardless of the node it is scheduled on.
The ImageWolf PoC runs on Docker Swarm and can integrate with both the Docker Hub and local registries. The ImageWolf image should run on both ARM and x86 architectures (ImageWolf was tested on a Raspberry Pi cluster). An example of deploying and running ImageWolf can be seen in the following video:
Please let us know if ImageWolf is of interest to you. Assuming there is enough interest we will produce a port for Kubernetes (hopefully straightforward) and start work on a production quality version.
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