Tomy, Chris;
Wang, Tingmao;
Barr, Earl T;
Mechtaev, Sergey;
(2022)
Modus: a Datalog dialect for building container images.
In:
Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
(pp. pp. 595-606).
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
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Abstract
Containers help share and deploy software by packaging it with all its dependencies. Tools, like Docker or Kubernetes, spawn containers from images as specified by a build system’s language, such as Dockerfile. A build system takes many parameters to build an image, including OS and application versions. These build parameters can interact: setting one can restrict another. Dockerfile lacks support for reifying and constraining these interactions, thus forcing developers to write a build script per workflow. As a result, developers have resorted to creating ad-hoc solutions such as templates or domain-specific frameworks that harm performance and complicate maintenance because they are verbose and mix languages. To address this problem, we introduce Modus, a Datalog dialect for building container images. Modus' key insight is that container definitions naturally map to proof trees of Horn clauses. In these trees, container configurations correspond to logical facts, build instructions correspond to logic rules, and the build tree is computed as the minimal proof of the Datalog query specifying the target image. Modus relies on Datalog’s expressivity to specify complex workflows with concision and facilitate automatic parallelisation. We evaluated Modus by porting build systems of six popular Docker Hub images to Modus. Modus reduced the code size by 20.1% compared to the used ad-hoc solutions, while imposing a negligible performance overhead, preserving the original image size and image efficiency. We also provide a detailed analysis of porting OpenJDK image build system to Modus.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Modus: a Datalog dialect for building container images |
| Event: | ESEC/FSE '22: 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3540250.3549133 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3540250.3549133 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Container, Build system, Docker, Datalog |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10159351 |
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