Improving the Accelerator and Technology Build Infrastructure

Jenkins is an open source automation server which enables developers to build, test and deploy software. At the CERN accelerator sector, Jenkins build servers are in charge of assembling and deploying more than 140 critical industrial con- trols applications. Currently, these applications are built on manually deployed build agent machines, resulting in unnecessary and time-consuming maintenance costs. Ideally, it would be possible to dynamically provision build agents using container images that declaratively define the build environment, without any manual installation of tools required. This can result in a much more automated and dynamic build process. This report looks into potential solutions for this problem, and, in addition, explores the viability of using Windows containers to take advantage of this im- proved infrastructure. The solutions explored are Kubernetes, Docker, Podman and OpenStack. The Kubernetes and Docker approaches seem the most promising, while OpenStack seems like a good solution that integrates well with the current CERN infrastructure but relies on VM's which can be cumbersome. Podman is found to be a working solution, but lacking greatly in community support.