Emerging container technologies, such as Docker, offer unprecedented agility in developing and running applications in cloud environment especially when combined with a microservice-style architecture. However, it is often difficult to use containers to manage the cloud infrastructure, without sacrificing many benefits container offers. This paper identifies the key challenges that impede realizing the full promise of containerizing infrastructure services. Using OpenStack as a case study, we explore solutions to these challenges. Specifically, we redesign OpenStack deployment architecture to enable dynamic service registration and discovery, explore different ways to manage service state in containers, and enable containers to access the host kernel and devices. We quantify the efficiency of the container-based microservice-style DevOps compared to the VM-based approach, and study the scalability of the stateless and stateful containerized components. We also discuss limitations in our current design, and highlight open research problems that, if solved, can lead to wider adoption of containers in cloud infrastructure management.
