Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Philipp Klaus via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Thu, 2 Jul 2020 17:22:33 +0200

Dear EPICS community,

for quite some time I was a silent observer on this list. After
learning a lot and packaging many EPICS applications as Docker
containers, I thought it's time to share my EPICS & Docker related
work. Here is a list of applications I package for use in Docker
images:

* EPICS Base (multi-arch)
* EPICS contApps (multi-arch – a module distribution similar to synApps)
* EPICS CA Gateway (multi-arch)
* catools (multi-arch – caget, caput, etc.)
* Phoebus (including its GUI and alarm-server/alarm-logger services)
* EPICS Archiver Appliance
* Cassandra PV Archiver

If you're interested, I'd like to refer you to the corresponding
directory on Github:
https://github.com/pklaus/docker-epics-directory#readme

Currently the following versions are used: EPICS base 7.0.4, Phoebus
4.6.3 nightly, Archiver Appliance 2019-11-13 and Cassandra PV Archiver
3.2.6.

In my opinion, EPICS in Docker has many very useful applications like:
* making it very easy for learners to jump into a working environment,
even on their own laptop,
* making deployment for non-x86 architecture potentially much faster
by providing pre-compiled multi-arch images,
* allowing to come back to an older working version a breeze in case a
change breaks the system,
* allowing to use modern orchestration tools to deploy to on premises cloud,
* running test scenarios with huge numbers of IOCs/clients/archivers
in an extremely fast and reproducible way,
* documenting "how things are run" and thus reducing implicit knowledge,
* ... potentially many more.

I'd be very happy to hear what you think about it.

All the best,
Philipp Klaus
__________
PhD Student in the group of Prof. Dr. Joachim Stroth
For the MVD detector of the CBM experiment at FAIR

Goethe-University
Max-von-Laue-Str. 1
60438 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System