The nydus project implements a content-addressable filesystem on top of a RAFS format that improves the current OCI image specification, in terms of container launching speed, image space, and network bandwidth efficiency, as well as data integrity.
The following benchmarking result shows the performance improvement compared with the OCI image for the container cold startup elapsed time on containerd. As the OCI image size increases, the container startup time of using Nydus image remains very short.
Nydus' key features include:
nydus-snapshotter for containerd runtime.Currently Nydus includes following tools:
| Tool | Description |
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| nydusd | Nydus user-space daemon, it processes all fscache/FUSE messages from the kernel and parses Nydus images to fullfil those requests |
| nydus-image | Convert a single layer of OCI format container image into a nydus format container image generating meta part file and data part file respectively |
| nydusify | It pulls OCI image down and unpack it, invokes nydus-image create to convert image and then pushes the converted image back to registry and data storage |
| nydusctl | Nydusd CLI client (nydus-image inspect), query daemon's working status/metrics and configure it |
| ctr-remote | An enhanced containerd CLI tool enable nydus support with containerd ctr |
| nydus-docker-graphdriver | [Experimental] Works as a docker remote graph driver to control how images and containers are stored and managed |
| nydus-overlayfs | Containerd mount helper to invoke overlayfs mount with tweaking mount options a bit. So nydus prerequisites can be passed to vm-based runtime |
| nydus-backend-proxy | A simple HTTP server to serve local directory as a blob backend for nydusd |
Currently Nydus is supporting the following platforms in container ecosystem:
| Type | Platform | Description | Status | | ------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------ | | Storage | Registry/OSS/S3/NAS | Support for OCI-compatible distribution implementations such as Docker Hub, Harbor, Github GHCR, Aliyun ACR, NAS, and Aliyun OSS-like object storage service | ✅ | | Storage/Build | Harbor | Provides a general service for Harbor to support acceleration image conversion based on kinds of accelerator like Nydus and eStargz etc | ✅ | | Distribution | Dragonfly | Improve the runtime performance of Nydus image even further with the Dragonfly P2P data distribution system | ✅ | | Build | Buildkit | Provides the ability to build and export Nydus images directly from Dockerfile | ✅ | | Runtime | Kubernetes | Run Nydus image using CRI interface | ✅ | | Runtime | Containerd | Nydus Snapshotter, a containerd remote plugin to run Nydus image | ✅ | | Runtime | CRI-O / Podman | Run Nydus image with CRI-O or Podman | 🚧 | | Runtime | Docker / Moby | Run Nydus image in Docker container with containerd and nydus-snapshotter | ✅ | | Build/Runtime | Nerdctl | The containerd client to build or run (requires nydus snapshotter) Nydus image | ✅ | | Runtime | KataContainers | Run Nydus image in KataContainers as a native solution | ✅ | | Runtime | EROFS | Run Nydus image directly in-kernel EROFS for even greater performance improvement | ✅ |
To try nydus image service:
nydusify. Normal users don't have to get involved with nydus-image.nydus-snapshotter(containerd-nydus-grpc) installed locally and configured properly. Or install nydus-docker-graphdriver plugin.docker, nerdctl, crictl and ctr.```shell
make
make release
make docker-static ```
For more details on how to lazily start a container with nydus-snapshotter and nydus image on Kubernetes nodes or locally use nerdctl rather than CRI, please refer to Nydus Setup
Build Nydus image from directory source: Nydus Image Builder.
Convert OCIv1 image to Nydus image: Nydusify, Acceld or Nerdctl.
Nydus-snapshotter is a non-core sub-project of containerd.
Check out its code and tutorial from Nydus-snapshotter repository.
It works as a containerd remote snapshotter to help setup container rootfs with nydus images, which handles nydus image format when necessary. When running without nydus images, it is identical to the containerd's builtin overlayfs snapshotter.
Normally, users do not need to start nydusd by hand. It is started by nydus-snapshotter when a container rootfs is prepared.
Run Nydusd Daemon to serve Nydus image: Nydusd.
In-kernel EROFS has been fully compatible with RAFS v6 image format since Linux 5.16. In other words, uncompressed RAFS v6 images can be mounted over block devices since then.
Since Linux 5.19, EROFS has added a new file-based caching (fscache) backend. In this way, compressed RAFS v6 images can be mounted directly with fscache subsystem, even such images are partially available. estargz can be converted on the fly and mounted in this way too.
Guide to running Nydus with fscache: Nydus-fscache
Nydus is deeply integrated with Dragonfly P2P system, which can greatly reduce the network latency and the single point of network pressure for registry server, testing in the production environment shows that using Dragonfly can reduce network latency by more than 80%, to understand the performance test data and how to configure Nydus to use Dragonfly, please refer to the doc.
Nydus is able to generate a tiny artifact called a nydus zran from an existing OCI image in the short time. This artifact can be used to accelerate the container boot time without the need for a full image conversion. For more information, please see the documentation.
Nydus cooperates with Harbor community to develop acceleration-service which provides a general service for Harbor to support image acceleration based on kinds of accelerators like Nydus, eStargz, etc.
A experimental plugin helps to start Docker container from nydus image. For more particular instructions, please refer to Docker Nydus Graph Driver
Nydus can also run with macfuse(a.k.a osxfuse).For more details please read nydus with macOS.
The containerd remote snapshotter plugin nydus-snapshotter can be used to run nydus images, or to run eStargz images directly by appending --enable-stargz command line option.
In the future, zstd::chunked can work in this way as well.
Browse the documentation to learn more. Here are some topics you may be interested in:
Nydus aims to form a vendor-neutral opensource image distribution solution to all communities. Questions, bug reports, technical discussion, feature requests and contribution are always welcomed!
We're very pleased to hear your use cases any time. Feel free to reach/join us via Slack and/or Dingtalk.
Slack: Nydus Workspace
Twitter: @dragonfly_oss
Dingtalk: 34971767
