Author: Locci, F.
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 icon 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 icon 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)