stargz-snapshotter VS dapr

A lazy chunked delivery strategy like used in the k8s stargz-snapshotter[0] project could be effective here, where it only pulls chunks as needed, but it would probably require wasm platform changes.

[0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

To optimize build speed, cache hits, and registry storage, we're building each image reproducibly and indexing the contents with eStargz[0]. The image is stored on Cloudflare R2, and served via a Cloudflare Worker. Everything is open source[1]!

Compared to alternatives like `git lfs clone` or downloading your model at runtime, embedding it with `COPY` produces layers that are cache-stable, with identical hash digests across rebuilds. This means they can be fully cached, even if your base image or source code changes.

And for Docker builders that enable eStargz, copying single files from the image will download only the requested files. eStargz can be enabled in a variety of image builders[2], and we’ve enabled it by default on Depot[3].

Here’s an announcement post with more details: https://depot.dev/blog/depot-ai.

We’d love to hear any feedback you may have!

[0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/estargz.md

[1] https://github.com/depot/depot.ai

[2] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter/blob/main/docs/integration.md#image-builders

[3] https://depot.dev

Seekable OCI (SOCI) is a technology open-sourced by AWS that enables containers to launch faster by lazily loading the container image. It’s usually not possible to fetch individual files from gzipped tar files. With SOCI, AWS borrowed some of the design principles from stargz-snapshotter, but took a different approach. A SOCI index is generated separately from the container image and is stored in the registry as an OCI Artifact and linked back to the container image by OCI Reference Types. This means that the container images do not need to be converted, image digests do not change, and image signatures remain valid.

This is interesting and seems general purpose. Not merely for container images.

There’s this option for OCI containers which I don’t pretend to understand: https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

It is used by containerd and nerdctl. You do have to build the image with it. Images work in OCI compatible registry. By fetching most used files first container can be started before loading is finished. Or so I gather.

stargz is a gamechanger for startup time. You might not need to care about image size at all

kubernetes and podmand support it, and docker support is likely coming. It lazy loads the filesystem on start-up, making network requests for things that are needed and therefore can often start up large images very fast.

https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

containerd/stargz-snapshotter: Fast container image distribution plugin with lazy pulling (github.com)

Yes, see https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter

Dapr provides a set of building blocks that abstract concepts commonly used in distributed systems. This includes secured synchronous and asynchronous communication between services, caching, workflows, resiliency, secret management and much more. Not having to implement these features yourself eliminates boilerplate, reduce complexity and allows you to focus on developing your business features.

Diagrid Catalyst is a Developer API platform providing a brand-new approach to distributed application development. Using the Catalyst APIs, powered by the Dapr open source project, developers can overcome the complexity of rewriting common software patterns and achieve higher productivity by offloading infrastructure concerns from their code to Catalyst.

The following two examples are open-source projects maintained by Fermyon with contributions from companies like Microsoft and SUSE. The first is Spin, which allows us to use WebAssembly to create Serverless applications. The second, SpinKube, combines some of the topics I'm most excited about these days: WebAssembly and Kubernetes Operators :) The official website says, "By running applications in the Wasm abstraction layer, SpinKube offers developers a more powerful, efficient, and scalable way to optimize application delivery on Kubernetes." By the way, this post shows how to integrate SpinKube with Dapr, another technology I'm very interested in, and I should write some posts soon.

Speaking of this has anyone had much experience with Dapr (https://dapr.io/) before?

I always thought this was a particularly interesting approach from Microsoft where they use this pattern to essentially take the complexity of micro services and instead try and keep it as simple as a normal .NET application but (and I think this is the clever part) in both a vendor and language neutral way.

But all of a sudden it means you can start removing all kinds of cruft and random SDKs from your codebase and push almost all of your interactions with the outside world into something like this .

Azure Container Apps hosting of Azure Functions is a way to host Azure Functions directly in Container Apps - additionally to App Service with and without containers. This offering also adds some Container Apps built-in capabilities like the Dapr microservices framework which would allow for mixing microservices workloads on the same environment with Functions.

Having containers is nice but everything (well ... nearly everything 😉) gets better with Dapr as an outstanding tool for app development in the container-based area. Here we go what might be worth a look:

Anyone using or planing to use darp Distributed application platform runtime as a microservices platform? https://dapr.io/

A CNCF project, the Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) provides APIs that simplify microservice connectivity. Whether your communication pattern is service to service invocation or pub/sub messaging, Dapr helps you write resilient and secured microservices. Essentially, it provides a new way to build microservices by using the reusable blocks implemented as sidecars.

Dapr is a runtime that implements common patterns such as pub/sub, state storage, etc. It runs as a sidecar to your app. Your app then interfaces with it using an sdk or http calls to use said patterns instead of implementing those patterns directly yourself. Seems pretty cool to me, but you can find out more at https://dapr.io/.