UMS: Live Migration of Containerized Services across Autonomous Computing Systems

Containerized services deployed within various computing systems, such as edge and cloud, desire live migration support to enable user mobility, elasticity, and load balancing. To enable such a ubiquitous and efficient service migration, a live migration solution needs to handle circumstances where users have various authority levels (full control, limited control, or no control) over the underlying computing systems. Supporting the live migration at these levels serves as the cornerstone of interoperability, and can unlock several use cases across various forms of distributed systems. As such, in this study, we develop a ubiquitous migration solution (called UMS) that, for a given containerized service, can automatically identify the feasible migration approach, and then seamlessly perform the migration across autonomous computing systems. UMS does not interfere with the way the orchestrator handles containers and can coordinate the migration without the orchestrator involvement. Moreover, UMS is orchestrator-agnostic, i.e., it can be plugged into any underlying orchestrator platform. UMS is equipped with novel methods that can coordinate and perform the live migration at the orchestrator, container, and service levels. Experimental results show that for single-process containers, the service-level approach, and for multi-process containers with small (< 128 MiB) memory footprint, the container-level migration approach lead to the lowest migration overhead and service downtime. To demonstrate the potential of UMS in realizing interoperability and multi-cloud scenarios, we examined it to perform live service migration across heterogeneous orchestrators, and between Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.