ACM SenSys CCIoT 2020  -  Best Paper Award  Certificate

MirageManager: Enabling Stateful Migration for Unikernels

Abstract:

Unikernels are a new lightweight virtualization technology born 
as an alternative to virtual machines and containers. Geared 
towards service provisioning for the Internet of Things (IoT) 
and edge computing, they offer extremely small memory footprint 
and strong isolation properties. However, the unikernels 
ecosystem is still in its infancy and lacks quintessential 
functionalities found in more well-established virtualization 
technologies. For example, stateful migration is a highly 
desired feature for mobile edge services in distributed 
environments which is not yet supported by unikernels. This is 
one of the shortcomings preventing us from reaping the full 
benefits of unikernels outside of stateless applications. In 
this work, we aim bridging this gap with MirageManager: a 
ready-to-deploy unikernel migration system enabling lossless 
migration supported by a function-level, application logic 
checkpointing library of our design. Our evaluation results 
show that MirageManager is able to lower the service downtime 
by ~80%, and drastically reduce the state transfer data by 
almost ~100% when comparing against Podman. Additionally, 
MirageManager also beats Podman, a container-based engine, 
in parallel service migration across constrained edge networks 
reducing the overall migration time by up to ~6x.


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ACM Library Access

@inproceedings{Cozzolino:CCIoT2020,
 author = {Cozzolino, Vittorio and Flum, Oliver and Ding, Aaron Yi and Ott, J\"{o}rg},
 title = {MirageManager: Enabling Stateful Migration for Unikernels},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Cloud Continuum Services for Smart IoT Systems},
 pages = {13–19},
 isbn = {9781450381314},
 location = {Virtual Event, Japan},
 series = {CCIoT '20},
 doi = {10.1145/3417310.3431400},
 publisher = {ACM}
}

Vittorio Cozzolino, Oliver Flum, Aaron Yi Ding, and Jörg Ott. 2020. MirageManager: Enabling Stateful Migration for Unikernels. In Proceedings of the ACM SenSys Workshop on Cloud Continuum Services for Smart IoT Systems (CCIoT '20). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3417310.3431400.