The thing with VMs is that there is much more overhead to booting a Linux VM which makes checkpointing much more attractive. For a container running with Linux namespaces/cgroups the container can be started in a few milliseconds.
Im sure there are some niche applications for container checkpointing, but I don’t really see the complexity being worth it.
Maybe checkpointing some long running batch jobs could save you some money, but you should just make your jobs checkpoint their state to an external store such a ceph or s3 and make the jobs smart enough to load any state from those stores if they are preempted.
Firecracker starts running the application in as low as 125ms. Most of the overhead in a "cloud cold start" comes from the cloud infrastructure, not from the virtualization mechanism.
Im sure there are some niche applications for container checkpointing, but I don’t really see the complexity being worth it. Maybe checkpointing some long running batch jobs could save you some money, but you should just make your jobs checkpoint their state to an external store such a ceph or s3 and make the jobs smart enough to load any state from those stores if they are preempted.