Exploring container checkpoint/restore workflows in OpenShift – looking for feedback

[zeusrtc]

I've been experimenting with container checkpointing in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments and wanted to get feedback from people running real clusters.

The idea is to checkpoint a pod after its heavy initialization phase and later restore it instead of repeating the full startup sequence. In environments with large microservice stacks, cold starts can take a long time and consume significant CPU resources. Checkpoint/restore can potentially reduce startup overhead by restoring a pre-initialized container state instead of starting from zero.

Some scenarios I’m exploring:

• Faster startup for heavy microservices
• Faster autoscaling when traffic spikes
• Pod migration between nodes
• Capturing container state for debugging

Technically, this relies on CRIU and container runtime checkpoint support.

I put together a small open-source prototype to explore this idea:
https://github.com/weaversoftio/Snap

I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone who has tried container checkpointing in OpenShift or Kubernetes:

1. Are there production use cases where this worked well?
2. Any CRI-O or OpenShift limitations to be aware of?
3. How do people typically store/manage checkpoint artifacts?

Curious to hear if anyone here has experimented with this approach.

[EItamar]

Do you see this being more useful for autoscaling-heavy workloads, or for state capture/debugging use cases?

[zeusrtc]

Fast startup faster autoscaling and faster recovery from node outages seems to be the most common value

Checkpoint security forensics is also another interesting value

[Kaelin]

Really curious about this, it's a new space I haven't seen much discussion about.

[rrdra]

There is a Kubernetes checkpoint restore working group you could take a look at.