ICALEPCS2023 - List of Authors (Oulevey, T.)

Paper	Title	Page
TH2AO03	An Update on the CERN Journey from Bare Metal to Orchestrated Containerization for Controls	1138
	T. Oulevey, B. Copy, F. Locci, S.T. Page, C. Roderick, M. Vanden Eynden, J.-B. de Martel CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland
	At CERN, work has been undertaken since 2019 to transition from running Accelerator controls software on bare metal to running in an orchestrated, containerized environment. This will allow engineers to optimise infrastructure cost, to improve disaster recovery and business continuity, and to streamline DevOps practices along with better security. Container adoption requires developers to apply portable practices including aspects related to persistence integration, network exposure, and secrets management. It also promotes process isolation and supports enhanced observability. Building on containerization, orchestration platforms (such as Kubernetes) can be used to drive the life cycle of independent services into a larger scale infrastructure. This paper describes the strategies employed at CERN to make a smooth transition towards an orchestrated containerised environment and discusses the challenges based on the experience gained during an extended proof-of-concept phase.
	Slides TH2AO03 [0.480 MB]
DOI •	reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TH2AO03
About •	Received ※ 06 October 2023 — Revised ※ 24 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 14 December 2023 — Issued ※ 19 December 2023
Cite •	reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)

THPDP064	Selecting a Linux Operating System for CERN Accelerator Controls	1475
	A. Radeva, J.M.E. Elyn, F. Locci, T. Oulevey, M. Vanden Eynden CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland
	Changing the operating system (OS) for large heterogeneous infrastructures in the research domain is complex. It requires great effort to prepare, migrate and validate the common generic components, followed by the specific corner cases. The trigger to change OS mainly comes from Industry and is based on multiple factors, such as OS end-of-life and the associated lack of security updates, as well as hardware end-of-life and incompatibilities between new hardware and old OS. At the time of writing, the CERN Accelerator Controls computing infrastructure consists of ~4000 heterogeneous systems (servers, consoles and front-ends) running CentOS 7. The effort to move to CentOS 7 was launched in 2014 and deployed operationally 2 years later. In 2022, a project was launched to select and prepare the next Linux OS for Controls servers and consoles. This paper describes the strategy behind the OS choice, and the challenges to be overcome in order to switch to it within the next 2 years, whilst respecting the operational accelerator schedule and factoring in the global hardware procurement delays. Details will be provided on the technical solutions implemented by the System Administration team to facilitate this process. In parallel, whilst embarking on moving away from running Controls services on dedicated bare metal platforms towards containerization and orchestration, an open question is whether the OS of choice, RHEL9, is the most suitable for the near future and if not what are the alternatives?
	Poster THPDP064 [9.129 MB]
DOI •	reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THPDP064
About •	Received ※ 07 October 2023 — Revised ※ 27 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 02 December 2023 — Issued ※ 11 December 2023
Cite •	reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)

Paper

Title

Page

An Update on the CERN Journey from Bare Metal to Orchestrated Containerization for Controls

1138

T. Oulevey, B. Copy, F. Locci, S.T. Page, C. Roderick, M. Vanden Eynden, J.-B. de Martel
CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland

At CERN, work has been undertaken since 2019 to transition from running Accelerator controls software on bare metal to running in an orchestrated, containerized environment. This will allow engineers to optimise infrastructure cost, to improve disaster recovery and business continuity, and to streamline DevOps practices along with better security. Container adoption requires developers to apply portable practices including aspects related to persistence integration, network exposure, and secrets management. It also promotes process isolation and supports enhanced observability. Building on containerization, orchestration platforms (such as Kubernetes) can be used to drive the life cycle of independent services into a larger scale infrastructure. This paper describes the strategies employed at CERN to make a smooth transition towards an orchestrated containerised environment and discusses the challenges based on the experience gained during an extended proof-of-concept phase.

Slides TH2AO03 [0.480 MB]

DOI •

reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-TH2AO03

About •

Received ※ 06 October 2023 — Revised ※ 24 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 14 December 2023 — Issued ※ 19 December 2023

Cite •

reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)

THPDP064

Selecting a Linux Operating System for CERN Accelerator Controls

1475

A. Radeva, J.M.E. Elyn, F. Locci, T. Oulevey, M. Vanden Eynden
CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland

Changing the operating system (OS) for large heterogeneous infrastructures in the research domain is complex. It requires great effort to prepare, migrate and validate the common generic components, followed by the specific corner cases. The trigger to change OS mainly comes from Industry and is based on multiple factors, such as OS end-of-life and the associated lack of security updates, as well as hardware end-of-life and incompatibilities between new hardware and old OS. At the time of writing, the CERN Accelerator Controls computing infrastructure consists of ~4000 heterogeneous systems (servers, consoles and front-ends) running CentOS 7. The effort to move to CentOS 7 was launched in 2014 and deployed operationally 2 years later. In 2022, a project was launched to select and prepare the next Linux OS for Controls servers and consoles. This paper describes the strategy behind the OS choice, and the challenges to be overcome in order to switch to it within the next 2 years, whilst respecting the operational accelerator schedule and factoring in the global hardware procurement delays. Details will be provided on the technical solutions implemented by the System Administration team to facilitate this process. In parallel, whilst embarking on moving away from running Controls services on dedicated bare metal platforms towards containerization and orchestration, an open question is whether the OS of choice, RHEL9, is the most suitable for the near future and if not what are the alternatives?

Poster THPDP064 [9.129 MB]

DOI •

reference for this paper ※ doi:10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2023-THPDP064

About •

Received ※ 07 October 2023 — Revised ※ 27 October 2023 — Accepted ※ 02 December 2023 — Issued ※ 11 December 2023

Cite •

reference for this paper using ※ BibTeX, ※ LaTeX, ※ Text/Word, ※ RIS, ※ EndNote (xml)