Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Sajay Antony

Steven M Lasker

Eric Ray Hotinger

Bin Du

Yu Wang

Samarth Harish Shah

Shiwei Zhang

Nagalakshmi Duggaraju

Brian Timothy Goff

Siva Garudayagari

Dongjiang You

Bradley Thomas Haverstein

Computing system enhancements make container instantiation faster, reduce layer content storage demands, and make more container image formats available. A container instantiation location sends a container image pull request to a container registry, receives an image manifest, sends a layer mount request to the registry instead of a layer content download request, receives a layer mount, optionally repeats for additional layers, creates a union file system spanning the layers, and launches a container process based on the union file system without first downloading all the layer content. Inefficiencies and technical limitations of some other approaches are avoided, such as loopback mounts for snapshot expansion, creation or transmission of extra snapshots or extra container image clones, cluttering layer content with virtual machine settings, container system vendor lock-in, lack of container instantiation at a local system due to insufficient local storage, and lack of syscall optimization due to storage driver plugin usage.

Container instantiation with union file system layer mounts

A cloud-based fleet of sandboxes is scalable along two tiers. Additional sandboxes may be added to a particular sandbox network in a particular sandbox stack, or additional sandbox stacks may be added. Isolation of individual sandboxes within a sandbox network is provided by virtual switches or routers, and subnetting. Isolation of sandbox networks is provided by network or port address translation, and by running hypervisors in respective infrastructure-as-a-service virtual machines. Provisioning efficiency can be provided by the two-tiered architecture, by use of differencing disks, by use of virtual machine scale sets, and by hybrid core-count sandboxes. Sandboxes may be secured but still have outgoing internet connectivity. Workloads run in the sandbox may include builds, tests of development code, investigations of possible malware, and other tasks.

Tiered scalability sandbox fleet with internet access

Growing community of inventors

Woodinville, WA, United States of America

Sajay Antony