The containertree software aims to support and encourage research that can help us to better optimize container development, distribution, and inheritance. Specifically, it provides various tree data structures to describe different facets of containers. I won’t go into detail because I’ve discussed these data structures, visualizations, and functions previously, but I’ll briefly review each one:
Container Filesystem Trees
Container Filesystem Trees are exactly what you think - a tree data structure where nodes are folders and files within a single container. One or more containers or tags can be mapped to the tree to allow for easy search, trace, or comparison of a container or tag across the tree. I’m tickled by the fact that a Container Filesystem tree technically is a container. The structure you interact with via the library mirrors what you see as the actual filesystem. This data structure should be interesting to you if you want to study the guts of a single container, or compare guts between one or more containers.
Container Package Trees
Container Package Trees keep track of packages and versions for one or more containers, and make it easy to export data frames of that data. I’ve been doing a cool analysis that shows a nice (expected) relationship between packages and container inheritance, but I’ll save that for a later post. The software can easily export package metadata by using container-diff under the hood.
Collection Trees
Okay let’s get excited, because I’ve been working heavily on developing the
Collection Tree
data structure, and it’s super cool. A collection tree represents an inheritance structure
for a family of containers. This means that the root node is scratch,
the first level likely includes containers in the docker library
(e.g., think of library/ubuntu:16.04 or similar)
and the children inherit from that. These are of course the defaults (you can enforce your tree
to have a first level of “chewbacca” if that floats your boat) that can be easily modified.
With a collection tree you can:
- Trace, search, or find a particular container
- Compare containers based on distances in the tree
- Export your tree as an actual filesystem
Let’s walk through an example to show you what I mean! I’ve already shown you creating trees, and searching, removing, or tracing nodes, so today let’s talk about the last bullet. The last bullet is fresh off the keyboard, and it’s about creating collection tree filesystems.
Collection Tree Filesystem
The more I thought about it, akin to the container tree, the Collection Tree itself also mapped really well to a filesystem. But instead of actual files and folders, the files and folders of the Collection Tree Filesystem represent the collection namespaces and tags. So I wrote a function to export the nodes as paths:
for path in tree.paths():
print(path)
/scratch
/scratch/library/debian
/scratch/library/python
/scratch/library/python/.latest/continuumio/miniconda3
/scratch/library/python/.latest/continuumio/miniconda3/.latest/singularityhub/containertree
/scratch/library/python/.latest/continuumio/miniconda3/.latest/singularityhub/singularity-cli
/scratch/library/python/.latest/continuumio/miniconda3/.1.0/childof/miniconda3
and then from that I could easily create the structure in a container.
1. A Collection Tree Filesystem Container
Let’s shell into this collection tree filesystem container! I thought about creating this as a squashfs filesystem that could be mounted from a container, but decided to just make another root (/scratch) in a traditional Docker container to make it most readily usable:
$ docker run -it vanessa/collection-tree-fs
If you run the example above, be warned that I’ve built a tree with inheritance for over 100K Docker images I’ve extracted from 2017. The dummy example below is a fake tree that I used during testing to exemplify that. First, notice that when we shell inside, the working directory is scratch. This is the root of the filesystem tree:
(base) root@c1e3d68bac93:/scratch# tree
.
└── library
├── debian
│ └── tag-latest
│ └── vanessa
│ └── pancakes
└── python
└── tag-latest
└── continuumio
└── miniconda3
├── tag-1.0
│ └── childof
│ └── miniconda3
└── tag-latest
└── singularityhub
├── containertree
└── singularity-cli
12 directories, 0 files
You can see here to understand how I created the Collection Tree data structure, and then exported it into a container. You basically need to know pairs of containers, a single container, and then whatever it’s base happens to be. I had a set of Dockerfiles (with FROM statements) that I also knew the unique resource identifiers for, so I was able to do this. This comes from the Dockerfiles dataset if anyone else is interested.
2. Collection Tree Filesystem Interaction
This is another really cool part. Once you have your Container namespaces exported to an actual filesystem, you can interact with them using standard linux command line tools! For example, here we are searching for a tag of interest across all collections:
$ find . -name tag-latest
./library/debian/tag-latest
./library/python/tag-latest
./library/python/tag-latest/continuumio/miniconda3/tag-latest
Or finding a collection namespace with a particular string (singularityhub):
$ find . -name singularityhub
./library/python/tag-latest/continuumio/miniconda3/tag-latest/singularityhub
As a more substantial example, here I am using the (bigger) container vanessa/collection-tree-fs
and looking at all the ubuntu tags! Since the defaults exports tags as hidden folders (starting with “.”)
for this container I changed the “tag_prefix” variable so they would all be prefixed with “tag-“. I knew
that containers have a lot of tags, but I never imagined this many!
(base) root@60a8aa15ef1c:/scratch# ls library/ubuntu
tag-10.04 tag-15.04 tag-bionic-20180426 tag-trusty-20150814 tag-xenial-20160125 tag-x...
tag-12.04 tag-15.10 tag-devel tag-trusty-20160323 tag-xenial-20160331.1 tag-x...
tag-12.04.5 tag-16.04 tag-latest tag-trusty-20160624 tag-xenial-20160809 tag-x...
tag-12.10 tag-16.10 tag-lucid tag-trusty-20160711 tag-xenial-20160818 tag-x...
tag-13.04 tag-17.04 tag-precise tag-trusty-20161214 tag-xenial-20160923.1 tag-x...
tag-13.10 tag-17.10 tag-quantal tag-trusty-20170602 tag-xenial-20161010 tag-x...
tag-14.04 tag-18.04 tag-raring tag-trusty-20170728 tag-xenial-20161213 tag-y...
tag-14.04.1 tag-artful tag-rolling tag-trusty-20170817 tag-xenial-20170119 tag-z...
tag-14.04.2 tag-artful-20170916 tag-saucy tag-utopic tag-xenial-20170214 tag-z...
tag-14.04.3 tag-artful-20171116 tag-trusty tag-vivid tag-xenial-20170510 tag-z...
tag-14.04.4 tag-artful-20180417 tag-trusty-20150427 tag-wily tag-xenial-20170619
tag-14.04.5 tag-bionic tag-trusty-20150528 tag-wily-20150829 tag-xenial-20170802
tag-14.10 tag-bionic-20180125 tag-trusty-20150612 tag-xenial tag-xenial-20170915
Here is how we can just count them:
(base) root@60a8aa15ef1c:/scratch# ls library/ubuntu | wc -l
75
Here is a peek into one of the smaller tag folders, raring, which I believe is version 13.04 (a long time ago!)
(base) root@60a8aa15ef1c:/scratch# tree library/ubuntu/tag-raring/
library/ubuntu/tag-raring/
├── ewindisch
│ └── docker-bomb
└── leifw
└── tokumx-builder-ubuntu-raring
4 directories, 0 files
What could you do with this filesystem? You could do something as simple as using it as a storage structure. Some related file content could be stored in the correct container namespace folder, or possibly even the container itself. If you are interested in calculating metrics, you might want to stick with the collection tree data structure itself. But another cool thing you can do is to write metadata to the filesystem directly. Let’s talk about that next.
3. Collection Tree Filesystem Metadata
What about metadata? What got me really excited was discovering that using filesystem xattrs I can add metadata to the actual nodes in the filesystem. First I tried doing it manually, inside my container (I was too afraid to do this on my host). Here is the usage”
Usage: attr [-LRSq] -s attrname [-V attrvalue] pathname # set value
attr [-LRSq] -g attrname pathname # get value
attr [-LRSq] -r attrname pathname # remove attr
attr [-LRq] -l pathname # list attrs
-s reads a value from stdin and -g writes a value to stdout
We could do something like add a count at each node, meaning the number of times the container was added as a parent or a child. You can do this in python or with the xattr library on the system. Here is how to add an attribute:
(base) root@38ecc937efda:/scratch# attr -s maintainer -V vanessasaur library/debian/
Attribute "maintainer" set to a 11 byte value for library/debian:
vanessasaur
The “V” means the value, and “-s” means set, so we use the general form attr -s <key> -V <value> <path>.
And then list the attribute:
(base) root@38ecc937efda:/scratch# attr -g maintainer library/debian/
Attribute "maintainer" had a 11 byte value for library/debian/:
vanessasaur
As another example, here is how to list attributes for an example library/debian folder that has had a count added:
(base) root@f379adcb3cb7:/scratch# attr -l library/debian/
Attribute "count" has a 3 byte value for library/debian/
To actually get the count:
(base) root@f379adcb3cb7:/scratch# attr -g count library/debian/
Attribute "count" has a 3 byte value for library/debian/
3
How awesomely wicked cool is this! We can put metadata with our files! For those interested in using this with containertree, there is a python package that would make integration easy.
Final Thoughts
I really want you to get excited about studying containers. While you are distracted with AI taking over the world, and everything touted as cool on social media, I’m over here jumping up and down trying to get you interested in data structures and organizational standards. Think about it - containers are the new unit of reproducible analysis, and enterprise deployment. We need to be thinking hard and carefully about mapping this universe of containers, or developing a rigorous method to not just randomly use a machine learning container to achieve a goal, but how to optimize your choice. And nobody is studying how different container bases map to different use cases. Do more people use alpine with GPUs, or something else? If I want to do some genomic analysis, can I quickly find the best container to do that?
If anyone wants to do a fun project to ask some of these questions, I’m a dynamo dinosaur programmer, and I’m in! I submit a small paper for the software to be reviewed, and will follow up with a small analysis with package trees. In the meantime, please contribute or provide feedback - the library is under development, and I’m continually hoping to improve it.
Suggested Citation:
Sochat, Vanessa. "Collection Tree Filesystems." @vsoch (blog), 21 Mar 2019, https://vsoch.github.io/2019/collection-tree-filesystem/ (accessed 18 Nov 24).