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.