Kohei Tokunaga

nerdctl is a Docker-compatible CLI of containerd, developed as a subproject of containerd. nerdctl recently added support of P2P image distribution on IPFS. This enables to share container images among hosts without hosting or relying on the registry.

In this session, Kohei, one of the maintainers of nerdctl, will introduce IPFS-based P2P image distribution with containerd and nerdctl. This session will also show the combination of IPFS-based distribution with the existing image distribution techniques, focusing on lazy pulling (eStargz) and image encryption (OCIcrypt). The status of integration work with other tools including Kubernetes will also be shared.

Pull is one of the time-consuming steps in the container lifecycle. One of the root causes is the current OCI Image Spec that cannot run containers before the entire image contents being locally available.

Stargz Snapshotter is a subproject of containerd that tries to solve this problem by "lazy pulling" - starting up containers without waiting for the entire image contents are downloaded but necessary chunks are fetched on-demand. This project proposes OCI-alternative but OCI-compatible lazy-pullable image format eStargz. In this session, Kohei, one of the initial maintainers of Stargz Snapshotter project, will show an introduction to this project and the recent integration activities with tools in the community.

In this session, Kohei will show the overview of Stargz Snapshotter including eStargz structure and its optimization and content verification, the lazy pulling technique done by this snapshotter and the relationship between this snapshotter and containerd's remote snapshotter feature. He will also talk about recent integration activities with tools, including fast image build by lazy pulling of "base" images on BuildKit, quick containers startup on Kubernetes. Recent standardization activity of eStargz to OCI Image Spec will also be covered.