Australian Research Container Orchestration Services (ARCOS)
About ARCOS
Australian Research Container Orchestration Services (ARCOS) is a community, driven by various national institutions with the aim of establishing a national Kubernetes service and promoting use of containers in research. After rigorous community consultation, the group has released the first draft of "A National View of Containers and Kubernetes in Research". The key findings of the consultations were the opportunities and challenges in the Australian research sector stated as follows:
Opportunities:
Reproducibility and reusability - containers can package code, libraries and sample data which can be shared and can reproduce exact results every time regardless of execution environment.
Portability and distribution - based on the fact that containers can package code and sample data.
Minimise infrastructure complexity - Running a container only requires a runtime engine such as Docker, Singularity, etc minimising system requirements.
Possibility of platform research projects using container orchestration (Kubernetes) - Kubernetes allows containers to be orchestrated making large scale projects realisable with efficient use of compute resources. Examples of such projects include EcoCommons, ASDC, Jupyterhub, etc.
Challenges:
Expertise, experience and practises are isolated and disconnected.
Diverse deployments leading to incompatible islands.
Kubernetes / Container orchestration is complex with multiple levels of expertise including administration, app development and security.
Ability to fully utilise Kubernetes features.
Fair containers are rare - The metadata and provenance of containers and the application of FAIR principles to containers needs focus.
How can software containers help your research?
ARCOS Symposium 2025
Join us for a one-day event ARCOS Symposium 2025 on 18 June 2025. The in-person and online gatherings of ARCOS members and other interested parties to facilitate community building, discuss group use cases in and to learn about the solutions and services being implemented.
The ARDC invites you to participate in discussions and help us develop national research capabilities in building reproducible and scalable digital research outputs using containers and Kubernetes.
Who should attend?
Current ARCOS members, anyone within the Australian research sector developing Kubernetes and container solutions, research sector professionals working on cloud computing, high-performance computing (HPC), data analytics or informatics and research software.
Featured Sessions
“K8s Gives Wings to Modern High-Throughput Metabolomics Biomedical Research” by Harry Wang, Research Specialist (Bioinformatician), Metabolomics Australia
“Delivering Scalable Research Projects on Kubernetes: Deployment Strategies, Practices and Lessons” by Ping Chen, Research DevOps Systems Engineer, ARDC
CNCF/Industry talks
Lightning talks
The Approach
ARCOS intends to address the opportunities and challenges by employing a four tier approach as outlined in the infographic. Firstly, by building a community with an aim to raise awareness, engage national research institutions and foster collaborations. Secondly, by promoting best practices through training of research software engineers, adoption of current practices and by creation of reference implementation. Thirdly, by providing user support, where trained experts and champions support the research software community. Finally, providing user experience by holding regular events, training and national community meetings.
The details of consultation and briefing can be found in - Slides, Video, Paper
Join Us
Join the ARCOS Community Group which represents a broader community comprising of members from various national institutions. Through this group, we bring community and industry talks, community discussions, reference implementations and more.
For ARCOS community group membership send a blank email to arcos+subscribe@ardc.edu.au
While the Technical Working Group (TWG) comprises technically experienced members collaborating to deliver reference implementations, current practices and sharing knowledge.
For ARCOS TWG membership send a blank email to arcos.twg+subscribe@ardc.edu.au
Participating Organisations
Contact Us
Send an email to contact@ardc.edu.au if you have any further questions.