See the summary below this highlight

• Introduction

  • Containers are widely used for scalable applications but face challenges with startup times for large images (e.g., AI/ML workloads).
  • Pulling large images from Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) can take several minutes, impacting performance.
  • Bottlerocket, an AWS open-source Linux OS optimized for containers, offers a solution to reduce container startup time.

• Solution Overview

  • Bottlerocket's data volume feature allows prefetching container images locally, eliminating the need for downloading during startup.
  • Prefetching is achieved by creating an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot of Bottlerocket's data volume and mapping it to new Amazon EKS nodes.
  • Steps to implement:
  • Spin up an Amazon EC2 instance with Bottlerocket AMI.
  • Pull application images from the repository.
  • Create an EBS snapshot of the data volume.
  • Map the snapshot to Amazon EKS node groups.

• Benefits of Bottlerocket

  • It separates OS and container data volumes, ensuring consistency and security during updates.
  • Prefetched images significantly reduce startup times for large containers.

• Implementation Walkthrough

  • Step 1: Build EBS Snapshot
    • Automate snapshot creation using a script.
    • Prefetch images like Jupyter-PyTorch and Kubernetes pause containers.
    • Export the snapshot ID for use in node group configuration.
  • Step 2: Setup Amazon EKS Cluster
    • Create two node groups:
    • no-prefetch-mng: Without prefetched images.
    • prefetch-mng: With prefetched images mapped via EBS snapshot.
  • Step 3: Deploy Pods
    • Test deployment on both node groups.
    • Prefetched nodes start pods in just 3 seconds, compared to 49 seconds without prefetching.

• Results

  • Prefetching reduced container startup time from 49 seconds to 3 seconds, improving efficiency and user experience.

• Further Enhancements

  • Use Karpenter for automated scaling with Bottlerocket nodes.
  • Automate snapshot creation in CI pipelines using GitHub Actions.

• Cleaning Up

  • Delete AWS resources (EKS cluster, Cloud9 environment, EBS snapshots) to avoid charges after testing.

• Conclusion

  • Bottlerocket's data volume prefetching dramatically enhances container startup performance for large workloads on Amazon EKS.