# Announcing the Checkpoint/Restore Working Group

DevFeed: [Announcing the Checkpoint/Restore Working Group](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/announcing-the-checkpoint-restore-working-group-17594.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.kubernetes.dev/blog/2026/01/21/introducing-checkpoint-restore-wg/>)

Author: The Kubernetes Authors

Published: 2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

Content type: release

Language: en

Sources: [Kubernetes Contributors Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/kubernetes-contributors-blog.md>)

Topics: [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [Containers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/containers.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/migration.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>)

Tags: [announce](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/announce.md>), [container](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/container.md>), [distributed](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migration.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>)

## AI overview

Kubernetes announces a new Checkpoint/Restore Working Group focused on integrating checkpoint and restore functionality into Kubernetes. The article outlines potential uses including resource optimization, faster application startup, fault tolerance, interruption-aware scheduling, pod migration, and forensic analysis, and describes related CRIU projects and ways to participate.

## Source excerpt

The community around Kubernetes includes a number of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs) facilitating discussions on important topics between interested contributors. Today we would like to announce the new Kubernetes Checkpoint Restore WG focusing on the integration of Checkpoint/Restore functionality into Kubernetes. Motivation and use cases There are several high-level scenarios discussed in the working group: Optimizing resource utilization for interactive workloads, such as Jupyter notebooks and AI chatbots Accelerating startup of applications with long initialization times, including Java applications and LLM inference services Using periodic checkpointing to enable fault-tolerance for long-running workloads, such as distributed model training Providing interruption-aware scheduling with transparent checkpoint/restore, allowing lower-priority Pods to be preempted while preserving the runtime state of applications Facilitating Pod migration across nodes for load balancing and maintenance, without disrupting workloads. Enabling forensic checkpointing to investigate and analyze security incidents such as cyberattacks, data breaches, and unauthorized access. Across these scenarios, the goal is to help facilitate discussions of ideas between the Kubernetes community and the growing Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace (CRIU) ecosystem. The CRIU community includes several projects that support these use cases, including: CRIU - A tool for checkpointing and restoring running applications and containers checkpointctl - A tool for in-depth analysis of container checkpoints criu-coordinator - A tool for coordinated checkpoint/restore of distributed applications with CRIU checkpoint-restore-operator - A Kubernetes operator for managing checkpoints More information about the checkpoint/restore integration with Kubernetes is also available here . Related events Following our presentation about transparent checkpointing at KubeCon EU 2025, we are excited to w