AppPACK: A Packaging Model for Single-Purpose Lightweight Virtualization Environment

In recent years, container technology has caught the attention of the communities by its performance and compactness. Although the design of modern container tools (e.g., Docker and podman) serves as a single-purpose application provider, existing deployed containers still contain extra tools that are unnecessary for a single-purpose process. The existence of unnecessary files and tools is directly proportional to higher security risk. Besides, extraneous files often make the container heavier and slow down its performance. This paper introduces a novel Lightweight Virtualization packaging model for creating profiles for a single-purpose application from an existing multi-purpose container environment, called AppPACK. Specifically, the model can generate a package containing minified versions of images, kernel, and virtual machine profiles from a target application. The experiment results show that AppPACK can provide an image of 1.1 to 37 times smaller in size compared to the original version. The experiment on execution shows that using AppPACK profiles could fasten the booting process from 1.1 to 6 times compared to the non-AppPACK version. The comparison between AppPACK and previous approaches shows that proposed model can provide more compatible and smaller versions in most cases.