DevOps Articles

GKE ludicrous speed! GKE Image Streaming speeds up container starts

Google Kubernetes Engine can now start containers up much more quickly than before! Google calls this feature “https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/introducing-container-image-streaming-in-gke” but it has nothing to do with you taking pictures while floating down the river on an inner tube. Rather, it’s all about how the container image can be streamed from Artifact Registry to GKE, just-in-time, as its various bits of data are needed.

As Google writes: “Image streaming works by mounting the container data layer in containerd using a sophisticated network mount, and backing it with multiple caching layers on the network,in-memory and on-disk. Your container transitions from the ImagePulling status to Running in a couple of seconds (regardless of container size) once we prepare the image streaming mount; this effectively parallelizes the application boot with the data transfer of required data in the container image.