Investigating post-creation port mapping of Docker containers

Sammanfattning

Container technology allows for applications to be run in loosely isolated virtual environments. Over the past couple of decades, containers have rapidly evolved, and their use has become increasingly prevalent. One of the foundational container principles dictates that a container shall not be reconfigured after its creation. Rather, desired alterations ought to be realised through replacing outdated containers. Consequently, the widely popular container management platform Docker does not support the changing of a container's port mapping after container creation. In other words, Docker does not allow for postcreation container port mapping without the use of container replacement. Even so, there have not yet been any recorded attempts to evaluate whether adding post-creation container port mapping without replacement might improve the delay associated with changing a container's port mapping.This thesis proposes an implementation that adds no-replacement postcreation port mapping capabilities to Docker. Upon evaluating the implementation against the current state-of-the-art method (postcreation port mapping with replacement) the latter appears to be approximately 25% faster. These results favour the continued use of the current state-of-the-art method. Finally, this text also provides resources for how a future implementation of no-replacement postcreation port mapping may be designed. This implementation is hypothesised to be significantly quicker than the current implementation prototype.