Nydus: Dragonfly Container Image Service

The nydus project implements a user space filesystem on top of a container image format that improves over the current OCI image specification. Its key features include:

• Container images are downloaded on demand
• Chunk level data deduplication
• Flatten image metadata and data to remove all intermediate layers
• Only usable image data is saved when building a container image
• Only usable image data is downloaded when running a container
• End-to-end image data integrity
• Compatible with the OCI artifacts spec and distribution spec
• Integrated with existing CNCF project Dragonfly to support image distribution in large clusters
• Different container image storage backends are supported

Currently the repository includes following tools:

• A nydusify tool to convert an OCI format container image into a nydus format container image
• A containerd-nydus-grpc daemon to serve as containerd remote snapshotter and setup container rootfs with nydus
• A nydus-image tool to convert an unpacked container image into a nydus format image
• A nydusd daemon to parse a nydus format image and expose a FUSE mountpoint for containers to access

Build Binary

# build debug binary
make
# build release binary
make release
# build static binary with docker
make docker-static

Build Nydus Image

Build Nydus image from directory source: Nydus Image Builder.

Convert OCI image to Nydus image: Nydusify.

Build Nydus Snapshotter

Build and run Nydus snapshotter: Nydus Snapshotter

Run Nydusd Daemon

Run nydusd Daemon to serve Nydus image: Nydusd.

Learn Concepts and Commands

Browse the documentation to learn more. Here are some topics you may be interested in:

• A Nydus Tutorial for Beginners
• Our talk on Open Infra Summit 2020: Toward Next Generation Container Image
• Nydus Design Doc