Image management takes a lot of time to upload and download the large disk image to Glance. By using rich features such as copy-on-write, backup, etc. provided by storage arrays, we can make the image management more efficient.
We are proposing improvement of Cinder volume backend for Glance. This realizes:
- Storing image data in Cinder volumes (upload/download).
- Sharing volume data among tenants.
- Quick volume-boot of virtual and bare metal machines using copy-less volume creation from images.
- Copy-less image creation from volumes for backups, image sharing etc.
To fully enable auto-scaling for applications, we need to boot instances as quickly as possible to respond the change of demands. By levareging the copy-on-write based volume creation, instances can be booted at once without copying image data. We also introduce quick boot for baremetal servers without copying images by combining with Ironic-Cinder support.
