Speaker
Description
Containers are becoming ubiquitous within the WLCG with CMS announcing a requirement for Singularity at supporting sites in 2018. The ubiquity of containers means it is now possible to reify configuration along with applications as a single easy to deploy unit rather than via a myriad of configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible or Salt. This allows more use of industry devops techniques such as Continous Integration (CI) and Continous Deployment (CD) within the operations domain, leading to faster upgrades and more secure systems.
One intersting technique is the AutoPilot pattern [1] which provides mechanisims for application lifecycle management from within the container itself. Using modern service discovery techniques each container manages it's own configuration, monitors it's own health and adapts to changing requirements through the use of event triggers.
In this paper we expand on previous work [2] to create and deploy resources to a WLCG Tier-2 via containers to investigate the viability of using the autopilot pattern at a WLCG site to deploy and manage computational resources.
[1] http://autopilotpattern.io/
[2] G. Roy et al. "A container model for resource provision at a WLCG Tier-2", ACAT 2017