Exo-clones: Better Container Runtime Image Management across the Clouds

Our key innovation is to allow volume snapshots in VDFS (our native hyper-converged distributed file system) to be exported to a stand-alone regular file that can be imported to another VDFS cluster efficiently (zerocopy when possible) called exo-clones. Our exo-clones carry provenance, policy, and similar to git commits, the fingerprints of the parent clones from which they were derived. They are analogous to commits in a distributed source control system, and can be stored outside of VDFS, rebased, and signed. Although they can be unpacked to any directory, when used with VDFS they can be mounted directly with zero-copying and are instantly available to all nodes mounting VDFS. VDFS with exoclones provides the format and the tools necessary to both transfer, and run encapsulated applications in both public and private clouds, and in both test/dev and production environments.